| sebastian_dangerfield |
03-20-2019 01:37 PM |
Re: Doesn’t Matter Who Wins the K Race; We’re All the Same
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
(Post 521578)
It's interesting to me that none of the responses you describe from conservatives involve engaging with what people like us here are saying. All of them (except "Social media is connecting disenchanted people," which is true) avoid any engagement by assuming that some kind of false consciousness is involved and attributing other people's views to some other cause: a desire for money, "secular religion," a declining society, "victim fetishization." In other words, there's a fundamental disrespect for what other people are saying.
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Psychologically, status quo bias is incredibly powerful. How many tired ideas and supposed axioms persist simply because they're old and they support the narratives of powerful institutions? (This is 70% of what's wrong with economics.)
Also, the right thinks it's unheard. It doesn't think it can be engaged or will be engaged because it thinks the media is against it, so it's cocooning. The right is very fixated on old forms of media. It embraces social media as an end run around mainstream media which it believes will not give it a fair shake. (It is not entirely wrong in all aspects of that indictment, btw.)
I personally think the right can be brought to recognize institutional racism. I think many on the right already see it. Where things degrade and engagement is frustrated is when racism gets mixed in with other items. The conversation with people on the right is hard to follow because somehow racism will lead to discussion of AOC, then Socialism, then it morphs into "everybody's complaining" which leads to buzzwords on the right like "victim fetishization." The left has many different groups with many different grievances all amplified at once. Racism gets lost in a hurricane of other complaints. And opportunists on the right seize on this and try to marginalize institutional racism, put it on a footing with trans advocacy or environmentalism, so they can downplay its significance.
Too many on the left seek to eat the elephant in one bite. Unlike the gay marriage issue, which was surgical, relentless, and highly organized, all the current grievances get wrapped up together. Makes a mess of the conversation. I think reframing all of the left's grievances by saying, "We must tackle institutional racism before all else" would be wise. The right can't and won't engage a million disparate complaints. It will seek to draw the left as eternally unhappy and impossible to satisfy. But it can't carve around a discussion of institutional racism. Even the Kochs are admitting that's a problem that needs to be addressed. (Granted, they're doing it out of self interest, but why look a gift horse in the mouth?)
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