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QotD

posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 05:26am on 2007-08-02

An exchange in a comment thread 2007-06-29:

[info] 28bytes: "Part of the reason people I know find many progressive politicians hard to support is their smug assumption that they are the sole guardians of reason, and that if you don't support their grand socialistic plans, you're clearly an unthinking yokel. Unsurprisingly that rubs people the wrong way."

[info] prodigal: "Substitute 'conservative' for 'progressive', 'holders of values' for 'guardians of reason', and 'fa[s]cistic' for 'socialistic', and you just made as good an argument for people who dislike the GOP as you did for people disliking the Democrats."

[info] 28bytes: "That's a good point. I don't disagree."

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There are 3 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
 

(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] smallship1.livejournal.com at 12:07pm on 2007-08-02
Mm. The thing is, if you have found a principle or set of principles that seems to you on consideration to be right, you're pretty much going to assume that it is right, and that other principles are less right. If your own principles seem to be *obviously* right, then someone who espouses other principles is going to puzzle you--are they not thinking clearly, or do they have some other reason for wilfully ignoring the obvious? And as for "smug," well, it's an emotionally loaded word and i think at least *some* (by no means all) perceived smugness is in the mind of the perceiver. Certainty can seem like smugness if you're ill-disposed toward the certain one. There's a relief in having found The Answer (the one that supposedly means you never have to think about the question again) and that can slide all too easily into complacency, again often mistaken for smugness. And of course, there's the element of "how dare you be smug at me when I'm trying to be smug at you." People who find progressive politicians hard to support often support conservative politicians and vice versa, and you get this ongoing spiral-of-smug effect that just puts everyone off.

Just my two whateversworth.
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(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] scooterbird.livejournal.com at 05:43pm on 2007-08-02
That may be true, but I would argue that the first poster, [livejournal.com profile] 28bytes, may have it wrong; I don't think there's a standard one-on-one equivalence. I do think the rightists have much more of a penchant for the certain, the iron-clad way-things-are. I don't think it's a secret why most evangelical Christians flock to the conservative cause - there's no ambiguity there, just a simple case of right and wrong, without getting so much into the wherefores and reasons. The other side-du-jour is an "evil empire" or an "axis of evil", and "you're with us or you're against us". It's no surprise that the abortion issue is framed as between "pro-life" - an absolute, final position - and "pro-choice" - a position which implies future decisions. And observe the epithets used against the Left: "flip-flop", "wishy-washy".

Sure, there are dogmatists on both sides, but the above quotes are used by those who lead the conservative cause in the U.S. Similar quotes out of, say, leading Democrats are much harder to come by.
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(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] realinterrobang.livejournal.com at 05:55pm on 2007-08-02
That's probably because the vast majority of the US right (at least) are either authoritarian leaders or authoritarian followers (more of the latter than the former). You'd be hard-pressed to find many real leftish authoritarians in the US; then again, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone in the US who was left of centre-right in a sane political system (that is, one where the Overton window of political discourse hasn't been pulled hard to the right for the past three decades or so).

Progressives in the US generally can't come to a unanimous consensus on what to have for lunch, let alone policy positions, which is generally why they get steamrollered by the hard right -- there are entirely too many people in the US who will vote for someone who espouses a clearly-articulated position on that basis alone, never minding what the policy proposals actually are. (The fact that most progressive policy proposals can't be boiled down into bumperstickerish sound bites only complicates the problem.)

In some ways, it's easier to be a Canadian leftist (not that there are many genuine leftists in the US -- there aren't, but I am a Canadian leftist): There are some pretty clearly defined "left" positions in the Canadian political discourse, some of which are not, in fact, "left" positions anywhere else. (Is there another country in the world where a sort of knee-jerk patriotism is a genuinely left position? Is there another country in the world where the political right genuinely despises its own country and wants to be part of another one?)
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