Responding to Cassidy Hutchinson
I’ve split my response to Cassidy Huthinson into two days in order to catch up on my posts. In this second part I am going to critique my own attempts to figure out a useful approach to MAGA people.
I have wondered here in my posts how to convince good, churchgoing, law abiding, intelligent people whose identity is threatened both by a world of rapidly changing technology that is upending everything including shipping jobs overseas and whose cultural identity is rooted in traditional American values of white supremacy, male domination, religious fundamentalism, dismissible of gender differences, anxiety about immigration and a belief in cultural exceptionalism, values that to me painfully exclude a lot of people and values that are too narrow in a new global consciousness in which people with wildly different cultural conventions must live together. I think that these values are traditional American values that in the past most Americans accepted. My sense is that there is little I can do to change people’s identity, that change will come as it has to gay marriage or acceptance of interracial marriage or global consciousness simply by the passage of time. But while this might happen, it is a very slow process and the world is changing at such an enormous rate that changes in values can’t happen quickly enough.
Besides, just my presence, talking in what can be perceived as a hoity toity educated way, with my well enough paying privileged position and inherited income and my elitist attitude which seems to dismiss the working class, is going to prevent anyone listening to me. I am not going to convince anyone to change and even my attempt to do so would raise hackles and further infuriate conservative people.
Cassidy made me realize that in any case I was trying to change minds about the wrong thing, either their attitude toward technology or their traditional American values. In a democracy people are free to believe anything they want with different people having different life experiences and different values. The issue was not whether people had the right values but whether we would resolve our differences and reach our goals through democratic processes and institutions. The issue isn’t MAGA vs Liberal, it is the survival of democracy itself.
And the basis for democracy is respecting the value of other people and their identities because that is necessary for democracy. We have to listen to each other and understand each other and then, by the very nature of democracy, one person one vote, all equally valid, we have to compromise with each other if we are going to live with each other non violently. Change will come through the ballot box and if that change isn’t satisfying we can alter it in the next election. Democracy allows us to change and change again.
But authoritarianism doesn’t. When we are completely polarized and refuse to listen to each other or accept each other, demonizing those with opposite beliefs, and are therefore unable to compromise with each other, then authoritarianism is attractive. A strong dominating male (or god) will silence our enemies and support our righteous cause. And the only way out of authoritarianism is violence (Hitler) or exhaustion (the Soviet Union).
Seeing how principled and strong, how thoughtful and intelligent, Cassidy Hutchinson is, shows me that instead of arguing with MAGA people or mocking them, what I need to do is to listen and to have empathy for their lived experience and values and to find ways to compromise with them (not them, us). We have to compromise in order to get along. This is particularly true when we are 50-50 and after each election tip one way or the other hoping to finally win out. Even democracy doesn’t give us a total way out. Listening does, empathy does, faith in democracy to help us resolve differences does. We are in this together and couldn’t pull ourselves apart from each other even if we wanted to since the urban areas in every state tend to be liberal and the rural areas in every state tend to be conservative. We are all citizens of the United States and citizenship, according to Cassidy Hutchinson and Ken Burns, is being responsible for our shared governance and being responsible for finding ways to get along together.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 