Every so often, I have a conversation with a well-meaning, very nice white liberal who will express concerns that Democrats aren’t doing enough to reach the growing MAGA population in rural America. The well-meaning, very nice white liberal will often have a close friend or relative who’s MAGA. It’s not their fault. Everyone’s family is weird, but this raises a larger issue for me.
The Civil War was often described as pitting “brother vs. brother,” which erases all the enslaved Black people who would live or die in bondage depending on the outcome. If white slave-owning brother prevailed over white non-slave-owning brother, both would remain free and fully human in the eyes of the law. That was never really on the table when the Southern states seceded.
There’s a rising fascist movement in America, one utterly hostile to democracy and to the rights of the marginalized groups. So, I’m wary if not outright demoralized when a supposed ally talks about their MAGA loved ones, who obviously means more to them than my Black ass.
It’s not that I can’t empathize with their position, either. Like my hero The Doctor, I want to believe that people can avoid a violent, destructive conflict if we just “sit down and talk,” but Donald Trump and MAGA are unfortunately far less reasonable than Zygons.
Polls have shown that Trump supporters fundamentally reject compromise, don’t care much for democracy if it means they sometimes lose, and resent diversity. It is hard to find common ground with people who’d prefer to see you buried underneath it.
But have we just tried buying them off? Many liberals believe we can win over rural America if we just listen to Trump supporters and do a better job responding to their needs. The slight flaw here is that Hillary Clinton did just that when she ran for president. She had actual construction solutions for improving their lives, especially in West Virginia. You could argue that this was Clinton’s personal failure. She just wasn’t an effective communicator, but even if that’s true, it doesn’t explain why certain people were never willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Her slightest gaffe was considered a declaration of war. Yet, they will minimize Donald Trump’s worst actions — even refuse to believe reporters when told that he plans to take away their health care.
Democrats do reach out to rural America and have responded with seriously considered solutions for most issues they’re facing. But Republicans stoke fears about DNA-altering vaccines, “CRT” and “gender ideology,” and when they’re handed the levers of power, they just give their billionaire donors tax breaks. I take no pleasure in watching Republicans openly con the willfully ignorant, especially when vulnerable trans kids are hurt in the process.
No one wants to learn the lesson from 2016 that rural Republicans voters aren’t interested in Democratic solution. They don’t care when we come in and save their towns after a natural disaster. Worse, rural Republicans might genuinely believe the problems they need fixing is abortion access and the existence of LGBTQ people. We can’t (and won’t) help them there.
It’s not anything we’ve done. We can’t simply talk less and smile more. These are people who think Hillary Clinton drinks baby blood and Trump is a man of God. The reality is that a segment of the population has been radicalized to hate people like me and the Democrats who support us, and that’s a problem with no easy solution.
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I don’t want to believe what you’ve written because it scares me. Unfortunately, I think you are correct.
It seems to me that there are places in this country where those in power have turned political parties into teams so hard that there are people afraid to BE Democrats. And I suppose I can believe that those people live with much more fear than I do when I vote or go about my everyday life disagreeing with others, in a state where there are more liberals than conservatives. But I’ve lost my ability to be kind to them. I’ve lost my interest in having any parties where some dipshit decides to tell me how Democrats like me are or flaunts racism.
The thing is, we used to disagree on political issues, and we could discuss that. Like, we could talk about how we felt about abortion, and no one yelled that Dems were killing babeezzzz despite being a giant Catholic family. We could talk about how we thought the economy should work, and unions, with disagreement but not vicious rhetoric. We could talk about the hurdles facing people of color in our community, or how we felt about how best to help refugees, or how immigration ought to work, or whether women with children ought to work. Every issue of the day, we could talk about relatively politely, even when we disagreed. Grandma (D) and Grandpa (R) both believed in the basic humanity of people everywhere, though. We assumed the purpose of the discussion was to make things better for everyone, including people not like us, even as “us” became a more multi-racial, multi-religion, multi-sexuality group.
That’s all gone. There is no way to argue politely anymore, not because the liberals won’t make an attempt to explain their thinking and consider a conservative’s viewpoint, but because the conservatives just spout talking points they cannot defend and cite “facts” that are lies. They may blame the pandemic for killing off 90 years of extended family Christmas, but it’s not that we had to Zoom for a few years, it’s that they stopped believing in the basic rights and humanity of people not like them, and now we don’t want to see them. It’s heartbreaking but I’m not going to tell my trans cousin that I’m partying with the cousin-once-removed who is trying to legislate them into the closet. I’m not expecting my white cousin whose wife is black to tolerate the cousin’s kid who believes in white replacement theory.
I don’t know how we fix this but I sure wish I didn’t have so many white friends whose opinion is “what can you do? Family!” BS. Speak up.