[There are situations in which there is no common ground worth
standing on, let alone hiking over to. ] [[link removed]]

ON NOT MEETING NAZIS HALFWAY  
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Rebecca Solnit
November 19, 2020
Literary Hub
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_ There are situations in which there is no common ground worth
standing on, let alone hiking over to. _

,

 

When Trump won the 2016 election—while losing the popular
vote—the _New York Times_ seemed obsessed with running features
about what Trump voters were feeling and thinking. These pieces
treated them as both an exotic species and people it was our job to
understand, understand being that word that means both to comprehend
and to grant some sort of indulgence to. Now that Trump has lost the
2020 election, the _Los Angeles Times_ has given their editorial
page over to letters from Trump voters, who had exactly the sort of
predictable things to say we have been hearing for far more than four
years, thanks to the _New York Times_ and what came to seem like
about 11,000 other news outlets hanging on the every word of every
white supremacist they could convince to go on the record.

The letters editor headed this section with, “In my decade editing
this page, there has never been a period when quarreling readers have
seemed so implacably at odds with each other, as if they get their
facts and values from different universes. As one small attempt to
bridge the divide, we are providing today a page full of letters from
Trump supporters.” The implication is the usual one: we—urban
multiethnic liberal-to-radical only-partly-Christian America—need to
spend more time understanding MAGA America. The demands do not go the
other way. Fox and Ted Cruz and the Federalist have not chastised
their audiences, I feel pretty confident, with urgings to enter into
discourse with, say, Black Lives Matter activists, rabbis, imams,
abortion providers, undocumented valedictorians, or tenured lesbians.
When only half the divide is being tasked with making the peace, there
is no peace to be made, but there is a unilateral surrender on offer.
We are told to consider this bipartisanship, but the very word means
both sides abandon their partisanship, and Mitch McConnell and company
have absolutely no interest in doing that.

Paul Waldman wrote a valuable column
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the _Washington Post_ a few years ago, in which he pointed out that
this discord is valuable fuel to right-wing operatives: “The
assumption is that if Democrats simply choose to deploy this powerful
tool of respect, then minds will be changed and votes will follow.
This belief, widespread though it may be, is stunningly naive.” He
notes that the sense of being disrespected “doesn’t come from the
policies advocated by the Democratic Party, and it doesn’t come from
the things Democratic politicians say. Where does it come from? An
entire industry that’s devoted to convincing white people that
liberal elitists look down on them. The right has a gigantic media
apparatus that is devoted to convincing people that liberals
disrespect them, plus a political party whose leaders all understand
that that idea is key to their political project and so join in the
chorus at every opportunity.”

There’s also often a devil’s bargain buried in all this, that you
flatter and, yeah, respect these white people who think this country
is theirs by throwing other people under the bus—by disrespecting
immigrants and queer people and feminists and their rights and views.
And you reinforce that constituency’s sense that they matter more
than other people when you pander like this, and pretty much all the
problems we’ve faced over the past four years, to say nothing of the
last five hundred, come from this sense of white people being more
important than nonwhites, Christians than non-Christians, native-born
than immigrant, male than female, straight than queer, cis-gender than
trans.

VIDEO FROM LIT HUB:

Jewel on Battling Anxiety, Living with Dyslexia and Finding Solace in
Philosophy
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[Jewel on Battling Anxiety, Living with Dyslexia and Finding Solace in
Philosophy]

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito just complained that “you can’t
say that marriage is a union between one man and one woman. Now it’s
considered bigotry.” This is a standard complaint of the right: the
real victim is the racist who has been called a racist, not the victim
of his racism, the real oppression is to be impeded in your freedom to
oppress. And of course Alito is disingenuous; you _can_ say that
stuff against marriage equality (and he did). Then other people can
call you a bigot, because they get to have opinions too, but in his
scheme such dissent is intolerable, which is fun coming from a member
of the party whose devotees wore “fuck your feelings” shirts at
its rallies and popularized the term “snowflake.”

Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of
the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no
other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to
the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled
cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s
feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some
compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the
delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not
halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists
and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and
immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell
wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?

I’ve spent much of my adult life watching politicians like Bill
Clinton and, at times, Barack Obama sell out their own side to placate
the other, with dismal results.

I think our side, if you’ll forgive my ongoing shorthand and binary
logic, has something to offer everyone and we can and must win in the
long run by offering it, and offering it via better stories and better
means to make those stories reach everyone. We actually want to see
everyone have a living wage, access to healthcare, and lives
unburdened by medical, student, and housing debt. We want this to be a
thriving planet when the babies born this year turn 80 in 2100. But
the recommended compromise means abandoning and diluting our stories,
not fortifying and improving them (and finding ways for them to
actually reach the rest of America, rather than having them warped or
shut out altogether). I’ve spent much of my adult life watching
politicians like Bill Clinton and, at times, Barack Obama sell out
their own side to placate the other, with dismal results, and I pray
that times have changed enough that Joe Biden will not do it all over
again.

Among the other problems with the _LA Times_’s editor’s statement
is that one side has a lot of things that do not deserve to be called
facts, and their values are too often advocacy for harming many of us
on the other side. Not to pick on one news outlet: Sunday,
the _Washington Post_ ran a front-page sub-head about the
#millionMAGAmarch that read “On stark display in the nation’s
capital were two irreconcilable versions of America, each refusing to
accept what the other considered to be undeniable fact.” Except that
one side did have actual facts, notably that Donald J. Trump lost the
election, and the other had hot and steamy delusions.

I can comprehend, and do, that lots of people don’t believe climate
change is real, but is there some great benefit in me listening,
again, to those who refuse to listen to the global community of
scientists and see the evidence before our eyes? A lot of why the
right doesn’t “understand” climate change is that climate
change tells us everything is connected, everything we do has
far-reaching repercussions, and we’re responsible for the whole, a
message at odds with their idealization of a version of freedom that
smells a lot like disconnection and irresponsibility. But also climate
denial is the result of fossil fuel companies and the politicians they
bought spreading propaganda and lies for profit, and I understand
that better than the people who believe it. If half of us believe the
earth is flat, we do not make peace by settling on it being halfway
between round and flat. Those of us who know it’s round will not
recruit them through compromise. We all know that you do better
bringing people out of delusion by being kind and inviting than by
mocking them, but that’s inviting them to come over, which is not
the same thing as heading in their direction.

The editor spoke of facts, and he spoke of values. In the past four
years too many members of the right have been emboldened to carry out
those values as violence. One of the t-shirts at the #millionMAGAmarch
this weekend: “Pinochet did nothing wrong.” Except stage a coup,
torture and disappear tens of thousands of Chileans, and violate laws
and rights. A right-wing conspiracy to overthrow the Michigan
government and kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer was recently
uncovered, racists shot some Black Lives Matter protestors and plowed
their cars into a lot of protests this summer. The El Paso
anti-immigrant massacre was only a year ago; the Pittsburgh synagogue
massacre two years ago, the Charlottesville white-supremacist rally in
which Heather Heyer was killed three years ago (and of course there
have been innumerable smaller incidents all along). Do we need to
bridge the divide between Nazis and non-Nazis? Because part of the
problem is that we have an appeasement economy, a system that is
supposed to be greased by being nice to the other side.

Appeasement didn’t work in the 1930s and it won’t work now. That
doesn’t mean that people have to be angry or hate back or hostile,
but it does mean they have to stand on principle and defend what’s
under attack. There are situations in which there is no common ground
worth standing on, let alone hiking over to. If Nazis wanted to reach
out and find common ground and understand us, they probably would not
have had that tiki-torch parade full of white men bellowing “Jews
will not replace us” and, also, they would not be Nazis. Being
Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists, transphobes is all part of a
project of refusing to understand as part of refusing to respect. It
is a minority position but by granting it deference we give it, over
and over, the power of a majority position.

Is there some great benefit in me listening, again, to those who
refuse to listen to the global community of scientists and see the
evidence before our eyes?

In fact the whole Republican Party, since long before Trump, has
committed itself to the antidemocratic project of trying to create a
narrower electorate rather than win a wider vote. They have invested
in voter suppression as a key tactic to win, and the votes they try to
suppress are those of Black voters and other voters of color. That is
a brutally corrupt refusal to allow those citizens the rights
guaranteed to them by law. Having failed to prevent enough Black
people from voting in the recent election, they are striving mightily
to discard their votes after the fact. What do you do with people who
think they matter more than other people? Catering to them reinforces
that belief, that they are central to the nation’s life, they are
more important, and their views must prevail. Deference to intolerance
feeds intolerance.

Years ago the linguist George Lakoff wrote that Democrats operate as
kindly nurturance-oriented mothers to the citizenry, Republicans as
stern discipline-oriented fathers. But the relationship between the
two parties is a marriage, between an overly deferential wife and an
overbearing and often abusive husband (think of how we got our last
two Supreme Court justices and failed to get Merrick Garland). _The
Hill_ just ran a headline that declared “GOP Senators say that a
Warren nomination would divide Republicans.” I am pretty sure they
didn’t run headlines that said, “Democratic Senators say a Pompeo
(or Bolton or Perdue or Sessions) nomination would divide
Democrats.” I grew up in an era where wives who were beaten were
expected to do more to soothe their husbands and not challenge them,
and this carries on as the degrading politics of our abusive national
marriage.

Some of us don’t know how to win. Others can’t believe they ever
lost or will lose or should, and their intransigence constitutes a
kind of threat. That’s why the victors of the recent election are
being told in countless ways to go grovel before the losers. This
unilateral surrender is how misogyny and racism are baked into a lot
of liberal and centrist as well as right-wing positions, this idea
that some people need to be flattered and buffered even when they are
harming the people who are supposed to do the flattering and
buffering, even when they are the minority, even when they’re
breaking the law or lost the election. Lakoff didn’t quite get to
the point of saying that this nation lives in a household full of what
domestic abuse advocates call coercive control, in which one
partner’s threats, intimidations, devaluations, and general shouting
down control the other.

This is what marriages were before feminism, with the abused wife
urged to placate and soothe the furious husband. Feminism is good for
everything, and it’s a good model for seeing that this is both
outrageous and a recipe for failure. It didn’t work in marriages,
and it never was the abused partner’s job to prevent the abuse by
surrendering ground and rights and voice. It is not working as
national policy either. Now is an excellent time to stand on principle
and defend what we value, and I believe it’s a winning strategy too,
or at least brings us closer to winning than surrender does. Also,
it’s worth repeating, we won, and being gracious in victory is still
being victorious.

[Rebecca Solnit] [[link removed]]

Rebecca Solnit [[link removed]]

_Rebecca Solnit’s first media job was in fact-checking and her last
book is the memoir Recollections of My Nonexistence. She’s sent a
lot of mail to her nieces and nephews during the pandemic._

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