On schism and the whole hating-Bush-and-his-voters context thing

[kiya]

Okay.

I don't know if this will be the last thing I write about the election.

It is arguably the last thing I want to write about the election.

I'm not sure I wanted to write it, but I can see pieces of what's out there, and there were people who were hurt and wondering about the hate-reactions that this election produced, and I can see something, a chunk of it, and so I offered to say something.

I am saying "we" in places here, because if I have to accept a categorisation politically, I am a part of the American left. I am not trying to speak for the entire American left here, just the parts that I know the insides of and the stuff I can see from here. There is stuff I'm missing, I don't know the motivations of everyone out there. But I know why I might be in certain places, and I'm trying to write from that.

I have considered turning off comments to this post, because I'm exposing some sensitive stuff in my own psyche in here, and I don't want to talk about it. I offered to write it, and I wrote it, and it's done, and I'm posting it, but I'm not interested in having my atavisms poked. I decided against, because I figured I'd rather trust that people won't try to start a pissing match with me, for a little while, just in case it's worth hoping.


First of all, the context.

Political discourse has been degenerating for as long as I've been aware of it; I'm sure people who are older than I would be able to pinpoint it better than I, as they were aware of it before me.

I remember the 1988 election, though; in that election, much was made of the use of "liberal" as a bad word, a negative one, which leads me to believe that whatever degeneration was present, whatever division there was, had not been that bad before then. And it's gotten worse since then, to the point that now people are saying "There are two Americas" and wondering what the fuck happened.

The left wing in American politics is practically nonexistent compared to other parts of the world. (You know Margaret Thatcher's old joke about American politics? "There are two political parties in the United States. One is the Republican party, which is roughly equivalent to our Conservative party. The other is the Democratic party, which is roughly equivalent to our Conservative party.") The range of political thought that's acceptable as mainstream or worthy of consideration in the United States is tiny overall, actually. In addition to that issue, the political memespace is dominated by right-wing phraseology.

It really is, though, before there's an objection to that: why is the D&E procedure referred to as "partial-birth abortion"? Why is "family values" code for monogamous heterosexuality? "Morality" for a certain form of Christianity? Universal health care is "socialised medicine". "Support the troops" as synonymous with "support the war".

Part of this is a form of ineptitude on the part of the left, a tendency to thrash around rather than come up with a phrase that can get out into the memespace and propagate, complete with its worldview. (This is basic, basic heka work here; framing the terms of discourse defines the terms of argument and the problem, as well as spinning the nature of the problem.) And coming up with truly godawful things sometimes that just don't work -- ozarque wrote about "Government is a Nurturant Parent" a while back; rolls trippingly off the tongue, doesn't it? :P

I think part of what is driving a lot of emotion on the part of American liberals is that feeling of being unable to speak because the language is so weirdly stacked. The connotations of a lot of default political language make it impossible to truthfully express positions, because the terminology isn't talking about what we're trying to talk about. The hekau aren't there; the words defining reality have been defined to exclude the reality we perceive, and there isn't a good handle there on how to start defining a different reality. (Nurturant Parent. Jaysus. Tin ears.)



And people put their hearts into this election. Put in time and energy and money and effort, voted early so they could travel to the polls and make sure nobody was cheated or threatened or intimidated, worked on campaigns, and so on -- and a lot of those people are burned the fuck out. They put their souls on the line for the election, and now they're feeling like all that effort was wasted, spent on nothing.



So, now, let's consider that as essential context and go on to why people are upset about this particular election. Why do people hate Bush? Or people who voted for him?

Well, a lot of us have been told for the past four years or so that disagreeing with Bush's policies in any way, shape or form is equivalent to hating the man. Some people do (I saw a comment recently that went something like "Nobody can hate Bush like a Texas Democrat. They consider everyone else to be johnny-come-latelies to the Bush-hating scene"); others have been told that they hate him so much that they've given up and figured that if they're going to get vilified for the emotion, they might as well have the emotion.

And the rest of us -- well, we're dealing with the isfet of being defined out of existence. And feel that it's convenient for the people who are trying to define the world such that we don't exist for us to be forced into the camp of "haters" so we can be dismissed as emotional and irrational. Which is a good way to open the gates of bitterness.

And some of the things that the administration itself has said haven't helped with that -- the "you're with us or against us" language that comes out every so often. And it's reinforced by the followers who define patriotism in terms of agreeing with the President, who call disagreement treachery. "If you don't like it, move to France." Heard that one? "If you don't like it, move to Canada" is another popular one.

Whether these are policy or just the culmination of the slow progression of the degenerative disease that has been slowly destroying bipartisianship, I don't know. But I know that I don't talk about politics in public, for the most part, because I don't feel safe doing it. It's gone beyond the "politics and religion are not for the dinner table" point of etiquette into the gut-deep feeling that whether I want it or not, there are With Them and Against Them, and no amount of wanting to be neutral or nonparticipatory can keep me from being drafted by one army or the other.

Both sides contribute; both sides are coming at this particular issue with the might of Righteous Correctness on their sides. People who try to express nuance and work their way through positions without taking up one of the defined, pre-established banners are the first casualties -- ladyofchulak knows this from being a pagan and a Republican both and people exploding from cognitive dissonance and trying to take her down with them.

The us vs. them politics of this past election have made keeping perspective nearly impossible. It's become easy to see the statistics that show that Bush voters are more likely to be mistaken on matters of fact on certain current events issues and presume that all Bush voters are idiots who don't know what's going on in the world; it's become easy to see the statistics that suggest that many Bush voters think him more moderate than his record and presume that they're either dupes or enthusiastic supporters of his policies. If it's already us vs. them, then there isn't a loss perceived in ignoring the humanness of the them, or considering the members of 'them' to be trying to do the best they can.

But I digress, a little.

I cycle back to "I don't feel safe doing it."

Because that's the core of the problem.

This administration scares the fuck out of me. I manage -- mostly -- not to take out that terror on individuals I know, but I can understand people who aren't doing that much more readily than I can understand how anyone can be not scared.

It scares the fuck out of me because I don't know what the rules are anymore. I don't know what to expect. I am change-averse, I am a traditionalist; I like things behaving the way I've grown to expect them to change.

I can recognise that there are people who don't feel personally targeted, don't feel that their families were assaulted and their value of human beings attacked by the thing called the "Federal Marriage Amendment", so I can correct for that, while noting that I know plenty of people who are even more wound up about it than I am, and even less forgiving. I can recognise that there are people who haven't been personally hassled or profiled like brownterrorist for going about their business like everyone else around them, who don't have events like that in their worldview, though it's harder for me.

I can correct for these things.

I can't correct for "Well, if you're not doing anything wrong, why do you care about these changes?"

I see a romance novelist with her computer and research materials confiscated because her book is set in Southeast Asia and thus she was doing research on landmines. (And I say, "That could be me," because one of my current RPG characters is from Southeast Asia -- and is crippled because of a landmine. I haven't researched her background extensively, but if I had?)

I see people seriously proposing that even if we don't torture prisoners for information ourselves, well, there's nothing wrong with shipping them to, say, Syria to get interrogated, knowing that that interrogation will include torture. And a case of this happening.

I see a man held in prison without access even to the lawyer who's working on his case because he's an accused terrorist, and wonder if we will ever know. I don't know if he's innocent or guilty, but I do know that I want to see the trial and the evidence. Not just get told "Oh, we found him guilty" and have him vanish, because that is not what my country is about.

I see a man accused of terrorist activities and not actually released until he was proven innocent -- by Spain, no American investigation involved -- despite the fact that the evidence against him had been discredited some time before.

I see people searching bags and hassling people because they're carrying gaming sourcebooks, claiming that the book is dangerous to the people on the ferry.

Bag checks, without warrants, on my damn subway. The local major paper did a poll asking people how they felt about the searches, and something like a sixth of the people answering the poll thought it was a good idea. A sixth. A third said, "Fuck no, and I'll leave the train rather than get searched" -- which several of my friends did do at one point. The remaining people? "What choice do I have? I have to get to work, and I have no other means." (I need to dig up the tote bag with the Fourth Amendment printed on it and get one.)

I saw nobody senior lost their job about Abu Ghraib. It was all someone else's fault, a tremendous game of pass the buck.

I see people putting signs in libraries to circumvent one of the strictures of the so-called 'PATRIOT Act', forbidding people from saying the FBI had been in the library -- signs saying, "The following organisations have not visited the library this week: The Boy Scouts of America, the United Way, the FBI".

I hear of someone hassled by security because she's more interested in drawing a parking ramp (an ugly thing) than one of the nearby buildings, that this behaviour is "suspicious", and she shouldn't be drawing their attention to that sort of thing. (Because terrorists are more likely to target parking ramps than big shiny buildings, you know.)

I see people I know vaguely talking about how they're their family's "Holocaust canary", responsible for judging when it's time to get the hell out of Dodge, and presenting their arguments for when to do so. And having people in the resulting conversation seriously discussing which points have come to pass.

I see the theocons having major influence in the government -- and while I recognise the President's pattern of cultivating them when he needs their support for something and hedging around them otherwise, I am distressed by the cultivation of groups that hate me, personally, on a number of levels.

I see the "security precautions" on the airways as a lot of sound and fury that makes very little practical difference, and wonder how many people were screwed over by "no-fly" that tries to keep one of my senators from flying and can be foiled by adding a middle name to a reservation.


My government is no longer predictable to me; further, it is unpredictable in ways that I find actively inimical. I do not know what it is liable to do, because it is not behaving according to my understanding of how it has functioned in the past; further, the deviations are all in directions that I find threatening, either in the global sense, or personally.

Yes, it's possible that all of this fearfulness is for naught, that things will come out all right, that the paranoia that I'm aware has been cultivated in me by both "sides" of this divide is just wasted cycles. It's possible -- but I can't bet that way, not when I'm trying to judge what possibilities I need to prepare for. (An optimist cannot be pleasantly surprised.) I cannot find a moral justification for trust.


And that's where I think a lot of the hostility towards Bush voters is coming from -- because while at an intellectual level I know that people had positive reasons to support this administration, somewhere, I can't see past the stuff that scares the crap out of me to even begin to imagine what they might be, what could possibly balance out the terror and the uncertainty.

You guys who voted for Bush -- I know that you didn't vote specifically to scare the fuck out of me. I know that wasn't your intent.

I have to work to keep that as something that matters to me, though. There are times I only manage it because I have no habit of public political discussion on most subjects.

I can only hope that someday you guys can understand why I'm scared, and maybe I'll be understand what you see that isn't swallowed up by the scary. It won't be any time soon.

But unless that dialogue can happen, sometime, America the vision, the dream, is dead.


(ibnfirnas, you're right. Love before breathing.)