Number three really sticks in my craw.
3. I WILL avoid demonizing people who don’t agree with me about this election, recognizing that it’s as wrong to stereotype Trump supporters as anybody else. I will avoid Hitler metaphors, recognizing that they stop conversations and rarely persuade. I’ll remind myself that no side has a monopoly on truth and that many Trump supporters are good people who want the best for the country. The left already has gotten into trouble for condescending to working-class people, and insulting all Trump supporters as racists simply magnifies that problem.
I made this image on flickr so I could tweet him a longer message than they allow.
I guess I'm a little tired of the nicey niceness of liberals. Writer Martin Amis came up with "Sinister Balls" in a conversation with his friend Christopher Hitchens, who was in the habit of making overly left-wing statements just to irk people. I agree that making blanket statements is never a good idea, but I happen to feel in this case it is more or less true; I think people who voted for Trump are either racist, ignorant or so nihilistic that its mind-boggling. I'm tired of apologists for the uneducated white man (see my previous post for more about this and why I feel this way.) Certainly some kind of outreach on the part of Democrats is desperately needed (Bernie was pretty much doing that, but he is way too left for most 'Mericans). I think some anger is in order and justified.
Props to Will Self and his interview about Brexit- I borrowed from his comment that not everybody voting for Brexit is a racist, but all racists are voting for Brexit, and his quote of Yeats' poem "The Second Coming," which he mistakenly credited to Auden.
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