MAY 18, THURSDAY

DISTANCE THROUGH EMPATHY

The second step for me, once I step back, as I was suggesting yesterday, and try to depersonalize the tension and try to put some objective distant between me and the polarization between MAGA Republicans and liberal Democrats, is to try and empathize with MAGA people both to understand why they feel threatened and also to understand how they feel about me, a self described liberals.

My personal perspective on MAGA people is that they feel threatened by the loss of their white identity (white supremacy from a liberal perspective), feel threatened by their loss of male identity (male domination from a liberal perspective), feel their gender identity is threatened by the acceptance of LBGQT gender roles (bigotry from a liberal perspective), feel threatened by unlawful immigrants (also bigotry from a liberal perspective), feel that their fundamental Biblical beliefs are threatened (religious bias from a liberal perspective) and feel that American patriotism, symbolized by the flag and national anthem, is threatened by a kneeling football players (civil rights as a threat from a liberal perspective). All of these things seem to threaten the identity of MAGA people and when threatened they take a stand to protect their identity.

But one way, for me anyway, to understand this threat to identity objectively is to see in in geographical terms rather than emotional terms, to realize that the threat to identity of liberalism is greatest for rural people and particularly for older rural people. I just read an article in the New York Times on how state legislatures are writing preemptive legislation to prevent cities from passing gun laws and other laws that the mostly gerrymandered rural legislators don’t approve of. This is anti urban legislation. For me this changes the polarization from being personal to being geographic. If you grow up in a rural community you tend to have your MAGA identity threatened and if you live in a city you tend to have liberal values. The rural voters seem to want to hold on to what they were taught and have come to feel are traditional American values, the values that made America great in the past, values they want to return to, while city voters seem to be open to much more diversity and seem open to technological advances that are changing the world. It appears that MAGA people want to return to a glorious past while city people are moving to a rapidly changing future. This doesn’t seem to me to be at all personal. It means to me that if you were dropped by birth onto earth in a rural community almost anywhere in the world and remain there you will hold on to traditional values and if you were dropped into a city you will accept diversity and be looking forward to a rapidly changing world. People don’t seem to choose one or the other, what they believe in and what they are threatened by seem to depend on where they live. That seems true in Britain or in Turkey or in any state in the United States.

If I try and empathize with rural MAGA voters all I have to do is to look at my mother’s family. In the little farming village of Buffalo, Illinois there was certainly white supremacy, fundamentalist church services with a call every Sunday for people who had been saved to come forward and a suspicion of papists (Catholics) one of whom married one of my grandmother Patsy’s sister much to the disgust of the rest of the family. It was a close knit, hard working, church going community of farmers and farm related workers with no connections to the rest of the world. And then my mother married my father and went to India and traveled the world, my Uncle Bill also became a missionary in India and then a faculty member in Forth Worth, Texas, and the other brother, Gene, entered the Merchant Marine during WW2 and traveled the world. They changed from being rural people to being city people and their values changed from MAGA to liberal.

When I look at the values of my ancestors on my mother’s side I can see how the rapidly changing values of city folk would threaten them then and would threaten MAGA people (the current residents of Buffalo) now.

MAGA values were certainly traditional American values then of white pioneers who settled the Illinois farmland and worked hard in tight communities. In traditional rural American no one was openly gay and certainly not trans and new gender roles certainly seemed to be intuitively unnatural and a threat to straight folks. While all the residents of Buffalo were descended from immigrants, the immigrant past was forgotten and now any immigrants who didn’t speak the English or were a different color were a threat. The fundamentalist church was the a center of Buffalo life and new scientific suggestions that humans had evolved from ape like creatures over eons was anathema and a threat to the Biblical story. Everyone was blindly patriotic in the first and second world wars, honorable wars, and the suggestion that that later wars: Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan were unjust wars was a threat to patriotism.

What I am trying to argue here is that most American’s identity was centered on MAGA values. The MAGA yearning to return to the past when these values were unquestioned by almost all Americans made, and makes, complete sense to rural people. Their identity really is threatened. They are good, church loving, law abiding, patriotic Americans who feel they are in danger of losing their identity.

And when I try to empathize with these rural Maga people this makes perfect sense to me. Of course they are resentful and furious. When I feel empathy I calm down and can accept MAGA people as fellow human beings, fellow Americans, and not crazies at all.