New World Politics

[OpiateOfTheMasses]

Following Brexit, Trump's win and the rise of nationalist parties in Europe (like FN in France) it strikes me that the civilised world is becoming more and more polarised with the liberal/left-leaning side of the debate losing. For decades now they have cried "racist" or "sexist" or "shame" at their opponents, but that doesn't seem to be anything like as effective any more.

At first I thought we were moving to a time when there were more bigots out voting (and there may well be an element of that) but when you see women and ethnic minorities voting for Trump (who obviously views them as second class citizens) there has to be more to it than that. So I wonder if we're moving to an era of these concepts no longer meaning what they used to mean to people any more? Are we regressing socially? Or is it something else entirely?

Whatever the root cause, if the left want to win any time soon they need to change their game plan because calling people racists and misogynists doesn't seem to be enough any more - not enough people seem to care about that.

[Anakin McFly]

Various factors I think:

1. The inevitable backlash to any movement

2. The results of a liberal movement that has focused on censoring rather than engaging and countering hate speech - works in the short term, but those feelings don't go away, and just end up growing deeper and more hostile if unexpressed until eventually it explodes in a fountain of hate and violence.

3. The internet is radicalising people like never before, and speeding up polarisation because now you have the chance to explicitly restrict yourself to news sources and friends who share your views. There was an interesting page comparing the Facebook feeds of a typical conservative vs liberal person regarding the same topic, and the articles shown were so different, often contradictory. People are literally experiencing different realities. We no longer share the same facts.

I had more to say but lunch just arrived

[Anakin McFly]

One thing I've been frustrated with is that calling something racist or sexist and leaving it at that is a lazy and I think ultimately harmful alternative to being more specific. We end up with the problem where "that's racist" can cover the whole spectrum of someone wrongly assuming a person is a a foreigner because they're not white to a mass shooter opening fire on black people for the lolz.

Whereas instead of saying "this is racist", a better response would be "this suggests white people are the default human" or "casting white actors in the already very few non-white roles we have takes those opportunities from non-white actors who are often rejected from white roles" or "this treats white deaths as more significant and horrifying than non-white ones, implicitly suggesting non-white lives have less value", etc. That way you actually get to the heart of the problem and start a conversation rather than a shouting match, which arguably takes just as much effort with greater emotional fallout and much less reward, plus you sidestep the reflex defensive action that people have to being accused of bigotry without letting whatever they said go unanswered. I've had good results with that approach so far.

What's particularly bad is that often the people casually throwing out accusations of racism and sexism without further elaboration are often not part of the targetted demographics, and often I get the sense that some of them don't even know why something is racist or sexist, especially if they just recite stock phrases that aren't always relevant to the particular situation.

[OpiateOfTheMasses]

Interesting news story about the main Liberal party in the Netherlands becoming more right-wing/openly less tolerant of immigrants to try to appeal more to populist voters who might otherwise vote for more extreme candidates:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-38956740

And given the increasing popularity of Front Nationale in France and the likes of Alternativ fur Deutschland in Germany, whilst it's unlikely that any of the more extreme views will get into any power (mind you we said that Trump wouldn't get elected and that they'd never vote for Brexit, so who knows?) it's a worrying trend...