House of Eratosthenes

Editor’s note: This article was originally titled “We Can’t All Just Get Along” in the print version of the magazine. The title was then changed, without the author’s knowledge or approval, to “It’s Okay to Hate Republicans.” The author rejects the online title as not representative of the piece or its main points. Her preferred title has been restored. We have also removed from the “Comments” section all threats to the author’s life and personal safety.

At this point I’m doing an eyeball roll anytime anyone says they’ve received death threats due to their public remarks, regardless of their ideology or position. I doubt like hell I’m the only one. Double-eyeball-roll if the evidence has been scrubbed. But, back to the change of headline: “Not representative of the piece or its main points”? Let’s just skip forward to her strong finish…

According to researchers, the two core dimensions of conservative thought are resistance to change and support for inequality. These, in turn, are core elements of social intolerance. The need for certainty, the need to manage fear of social change, lead to black-and-white thinking and an embrace of stereotypes. Which could certainly lead to a desire to deride those not like you — whether people of color, LGBT people or Democrats. And, especially since the early 1990s, Republican politicians and pundits have been feeding these needs with a single-minded, uncomplicated, good-vs.-evil worldview that vilifies Democrats.

So now we hate them back. And for good reason. Which is too bad. I miss the Fred Lippitts of yore and the civilized discourse and political accomplishments they made possible. And so do millions of totally fed-up Americans.

Well gee, I’m not quite seeing how “It’s Okay to Hate Republicans” is an unfair summary. I think most people of all ideological persuasions, reading this piece casually, would make that their main take-away.

Let’s see how she starts it, up-top:

I hate Republicans. I can’t stand the thought of having to spend the next two years watching Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Ted Cruz, Darrell Issa or any of the legions of other blowhards denying climate change, thwarting immigration reform or championing fetal “personhood.”

This loathing is a relatively recent phenomenon. Back  in the 1970s, I worked for a Republican, Fred Lippitt, the senate minority leader in Rhode Island, and I loved him. He was a brand of Republican now extinct — a “moderate” who was fiscally conservative but progressive about women’s rights, racial justice and environmental preservation. Had he been closer to my age, I could have contemplated marrying someone like Fred. Today, marrying a Republican is unimaginable to me. And I’m  not alone. Back in 1960, only 5  percent of Republicans and 4  percent of Democrats said they’d  be “displeased” if their child married someone from the opposite  party. Today? Forty-nine percent  of Republicans and 33 percent of  Democrats would be pissed.

According to a recent study  by Stanford professor Shanto  Iyengar and Princeton researcher  Sean Westwood, such polarization has increased dramatically  in recent years. What’s noteworthy  is how entrenched this mutual animus is. It’s fine for me to use the word “hate” when referring to Republicans and for them to use the same word about me, but you would never use the word “hate” when referring to people of color, or women, or gays and lesbians.

And now party identification and hatred shape a whole host of non-political decisions. Iyengar and Westwood asked participants in their study to review the resumes of graduating high school seniors to decide which ones should receive scholarships. Some resumes had cues about party affiliation and some about racial identity. Race mattered, but not nearly as much as partisanship. An overwhelming 80 percent of partisans chose the student of their own party. And this held true even if the candidate from the opposite party had better credentials.

How did we come to this pass? Obviously, my tendency is to blame the Republicans more than the Democrats, which may seem biased. But history and psychological research bear me out.

Let’s start with the history. This isn’t like a fight between siblings, where the parent says, “It doesn’t matter who started it.” Yes, it does.

A brief review of Republican rhetoric and strategies since the 1980s shows an escalation of determined vilification (which has been amplified relentlessly on Fox News since 1996). From Spiro Agnew’s attack on intellectuals as an “effete corps of impudent snobs”; to Rush Limbaugh’s hate speech; to the GOP’s endless campaign to smear the Clintons over Whitewater, then bludgeon Bill over Monica Lewinsky; to the ceaseless denigration of President Obama, the Republicans have crafted a political identity that rests on a complete repudiation of the idea that the opposing party and its followers have any legitimacy at all.

I think I can see why some well-intentioned editor put a headline on her story that wasn’t in concert with her “main points”: She hasn’t supported them. The Republicans are more to blame than the democrats, because some Republicans had some bad things to say about democrats? To establish a relative superiority in the blame department, you would have to compare. You would have to at least look at the bad things democrats have had to say about Republicans. The Republican-hating lady didn’t even bother.

She’d better brush up on her main-point-making skills before she goes someplace where they’re going to be tested, like for example, college! Oh…uh…wait…

Susan J. Douglas is a professor of communications at the University of Michigan and an In These Times columnist. Her latest book is Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message That Feminism’s Work is Done (2010).

Well now. I would hope people of all political persuasions would be inclined to agree — that is a problem. A “professor of communications” has to go running around, getting the last word in on her arguments, enforcing how people interpret her messages, persuading one editor to overrule the other editor to get the headlines “right.” This doesn’t impress me as a stellar job of communicating, nor does it impress me as professorial work. Well, nowadays, maybe it is. The University has weighed in:

On Thursday, university released a statement saying that the “views expressed are those of the individual faculty member and not those of the University of Michigan.”

“Faculty freedom of expression, including in the public sphere, is one of the core values of our institution,” university spokesman Rick Fitzgerald said, according to M-Live. “At the same time, the university must and will work vigilantly to ensure students can express diverse ideas and perspectives in a respectful environment and without fear of reprisal. The university values viewpoint diversity and encourages a wide range of opinions.”

So if I’m a Republican student in her class, I know I can rest assured I’ll be all, you know, graded fairly and everything.

Actually, I’m less concerned about that than I am about the irony-immunity involved in saying things like “complete repudiation of the idea that the opposing party and its followers have any legitimacy at all” — in context of the rest of her remarks. That isn’t just failing to support a point, or lunging to alter a point after it’s gotten a little bit too much publicity in the wrong places. That last one, there, borders on a mental feebleness. And it’s not just Susan J. Douglas who suffers from this problem.

What’s really going on here though is the black-and-white thing. I’m not talking about race, I’m talking about the “need for certainty…lead[s] to black-and-white thinking.” We, here on this blog, have been dragged into that thing about black-and-white thinking. Yes, there is something going on here and it does have to do with the differences in the way liberals and conservatives see opposites. Affirmative action is a good example, although there are many, many others. You have equal treatment, without regard to race, sex, creed, nationality, sexual preference, et al. Then you have unequal treatment. Libs will make the point, unequal treatment is really equal treatment; conservatives will respond, correctly, no those two things are opposites. The lib, reliable as a sunrise, will observe that the opposition is engaging in this “black-and-white thinking” which is supposed to be somehow erroneous…

Uh, problem. Opposites are opposites. When things are opposites, they are not the same.

On Planet Liberal, I’ve noticed, it is seen as a proper rebuttal to find some increment between the extremes. In other words, they don’t seem to understand relativity. East. West. Ah ha, but here is a point that is East of some things, West of some other things! This shows how your black-and-white thinking fails! Er…actually, when you find an increment between two extremes, that doesn’t prove the two extremes are the same. They still remain opposites. If anything, finding an increment between two extremes proves, or at least provides support for the idea, that the opposite extremes are indeed opposite extremes.

Proggies do that an awful lot, I notice. They support arguments that rely on things being the same, when those things are really different, like the equal/unequal-treatment thing with affirmative action. Just as often, they support arguments that rely on things being different, when they’re actually — for all practical purposes — the same. And they do an awful lot of what Professor Douglas did here, accuse the other side of having some sort of monopoly on exclusionary or negative feelings about the opposition, and then within a few short sentences go on to prove that it isn’t so. They seem genuinely ignorant of the irony.

I’m sure she would be astonished to discover that she’s never been as accepting of other people as she thinks. Why did she like Mr. Lippitt? He agreed with her politically. Why should we all give her brownie points for “tolerating” someone who thinks identically to her? She would have hated Bill Buckley just as much in 1974 as she hates Limbaugh forty years later. I mean, she quotes Spiro Agnew circa Watergate!

This gets right to the heart of what you talk about. Thought experiment time!

“According to researchers, the two core dimensions of [star-bellied Sneetch] thought are resistance to change and support for inequality. These, in turn, are core elements of social intolerance. The need for certainty, the need to manage fear of social change, lead to black-and-white thinking and an embrace of stereotypes. Which could certainly lead to a desire to deride those not like you, whether [Sneetches with no stars], [barbaloots] or [the Lorax]. And, especially since the early 1990s, [Sneetch] politicians and pundits have been feeding these needs with a single-minded, uncomplicated, good-vs.-evil worldview that vilifies [the Loraxes].”

Simple, right? Remove the party identifiers. Whose party, whose culture, whose writing and worldview better-fits the description? Who is socially intolerant, who feels no need to sugarcoat their hatred for people who think differently – nor their desire to criminalize those different thoughts? Who is so so very addicted to certainty and black-and-white thinking? And whose pundits feed those needs with constant propaganda about those eeeeeeeevul grandma-starving, Gaia-ravishing, gay-lynchin’, puttin-y’alls-back-in-chains non-cake bakers?

A-yep.

We’re very Clubber Lang here on the Right. We don’t hate Lefties, we pity the fools. We don’t dislike them for being different from us, but because their positions don’t make a lick of internal sense – some of the best refutations of Lefty policy come from Lefty platitudes. Follow the logical results of their premises and they disprove the premises. Even your East-West analogy – they think it’s a refutation to say that certain things are East of some things, West of others? Well, doesn’t that assume a priori that East and West are actual absolute things? Otherwise you couldn’t say your middle position was, in fact, East of this and West of that. They haven’t disproved East and West at all, they’ve confirmed it – they actually had to rely on it to even try to rebut them. A lot of what they say and do winds up like this, they have to smuggle in the very concepts they claim to disdain in order to argue with anything at all.

They think they’re poets in a world of prose that hates poetry – so they get to hate prose. But they aren’t writing poetry, they’re tossing scrabble tiles and boggle cubes into the air and calling the resulting mess “poetry” that “you can’t possibly understand.” But it isn’t poetry, it isn’t language at all, even though it uses the same letters. Any words formed are quite by random, much less any string of them that could express a thought or sentiment. You’re as likely to spell “PLGbbew”as “kumquat” as “freedom” out of the pile. It isn’t hate to point that out. In fact, it’s a service. If they really want to be poets they would be well-served to learn how to put letters into words and words into sentences – and then we may actually have some thought-provoking poetry to consider.
- nightfly | 12/19/2014 @ 08:48
On the upside, at least we get to see a source for your troll infestation’s constant ad hominems. Your black-and-white thinking and support for inequality are, like, science, dude.

Facts have a liberal bias and all that.

In all seriousness, though, I’d love to see the lab work on that one. Specifically, I need the operative definitions of “support” and “inequality.” Because — let’s face it– we all support inequality sometimes, and in fact fairly regularly. I support inequality when the Mariners play the Yankees (I hope the Yanks have infinitely inferior players). I support inequality of kill ratios when American forces engage jihadis (I hope they’re 100% in our favor). Liberals support inequality when it comes to access to firearms, and political speech, and taxation, and….

“Science” sure is easy — and fun! — when you get to make up both the methodology and the results…
- Severian | 12/19/2014 @ 12:19

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Friday, December 19th, 2014