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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?
Can you give me some examples of times that it worked on you?
My impression is that in general comparison is a poor argument, because it typically ignores some outside context that makes the situations incomparable.
Not the OP, but the classic cases for me are racial role reversals, where a conservative is appealing to color-blind classical liberalism to counter something like "white people are the worst because..." with "imagine if you said black people are the worst...". I would say that this sort of hypocrisy being pointed out did "work" on me when I was younger. It made me realize that most people are not actually committed to consistent principles and helped me to identify that we were moving into a new post-liberal politics in the early 2010s, where the motte was liberal equality and the bailey was a sex and race based hierarchy.
Like many on this site I probably feel an unusually strong need for consistency and logical coherence, and when I was younger I did not have good theory of mind for others. I didn't have good theory of mind for myself, either, to be honest. Now that I have done more self reflection, I can see how my own desire to impose coherence and consistency is quite selective and self-serving when it comes to tribal battles or arguments where my ego gets involved.
Yes, this is what I meant.
Starting with the principle of "all people should be treated equally", then the role reversal thought experiment works.
But I suppose most people don't actually start with that precept. Progressives, for example, might start with a different precept such as "black people are good" and "white people are bad". Therefore, a black person hurting a white person is fundamentally different than the reverse.
So the role reversal argument falls flat. You'd have to attempt to reverse the underlying belief of moral superiority based on race.
Critical theory tries to get around that with its usual sophistry and redefinition. Racism = power + prejudice where because black people don't have systemic power like white people do, they can't be racist.
This is reflected all the way back to the bourgeois and the proletariat. It's custom engineered rhetorical weapons that can't be used against their owners and that can be used to create permission structures for you to do all sorts of nasty things to your outgroup. See also: 'The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house'.
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