Matthew McConaughey made news today. I’ll just post a few quotes before I outline a response. Why? Because there’s talk of him getting into politics and because it’s a good segue to confront a few of the misperceptions people have about liberal intellectuals, “real working people,” and the Democratic party in general.
“There is a lot [of people] on that illiberal left that absolutely condescend, patronize, and are arrogant towards that other 50%,” he said.
“I’m sure you saw it in our industry when Trump was voted in four years ago,” McConaughey continued. “They were in denial that was real. Some of them were in absolute denial.”
And now, the “Lincoln Lawyer” star asserted, the left shouldn’t expect Trump voters to accept President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
“Looks like Biden’s our guy,” McConaughey said. “Now you’ve got the right that’s in denial, ’cause their side has fake news. And I understand. They’ve been fed fake news. No one knows who the hell to believe, right? So they’re putting down their last bastion of defense.”
…
“I wanna say I’ll meet you in the middle,” he told Brand. “I actually think that it’s more of a dare than it’s ever been. ... Let’s get aggressively centrist.” He said reframing it as a dare could appeal to the right.
“The left is gonna have to understand the science of the values of meet you in the middle,” he said. “... I believe there is science to it.”
www.huffpost.com/...
1. When discussing American and British arrogance, it’s probably a good idea to include some voices that aren’t a) white, b) male, and/or c) media personalities. Liken it to writing a proper research paper. You need sources that are more reliable and can lend authenticity to your argument rather than undermine it.
2. One can pretty effectively argue that arrogance is a kind of national pass time in Britain and America (colonialism), so it’s hard to make a convincing case that the Left has any kind of monopoly on it. Personally, I would argue that the perception of arrogance and condescension coming from the Left is certainly present from time to time but I think in large it’s just a fake talking point to create unnecessary division and mischaracterize our base of voters as “not real working people.” When arrogance and condescension are sensed from more educated liberals, much of the time it’s really just exasperation. That’s a different kind of emotion.
3. It’s important here to point out that getting a high level degree, learning how to write a proper thesis paper, doing scientific or medical research… these are all VERY HARD to do well. It’s hard work. It’s not the kind of work most people have the patience and stick-to-it-ed-ness to follow through on. Many many many Americans try but settle for less once they realize how hard it is at school. We need to relearn as a nation to respect people who do hard work and who’ve acquired a body of knowledge the responsible way, rather than taking short cuts and reading a book or two written by their favorite libertarian and then claiming to have equally valid opinions on things like complex economic problems or a viral pandemic. Respect hard work. I think liberals actually are the ones who do that better, whether it’s hard work that’s done by an underpaid healthcare worker or hard work done by a doctor, economist, or scientist.
4. We’re exasperated. Give us a little slack. Republicans have never had to live through a Democratic presidency as ridiculous as Trump’s. Any HONEST and SINCERE person will admit that. It’s a false equivalency to compare our reaction to Trump’s election to anything else, honestly. He friggin’ asked Russia to help him commit Treason by using data their spies stole from the US government. He also bragged about sexually assaulting women on tape and paid off numerous women he cheated on his wife with. I mean… “come on, man.” This is apples and orange colored eggs and ham.
5. Meeting in the middle is a not a “scientific solution.” I appreciate someone on the right using the word “science” (knowing condescension trigger warning) but “I don’t think it means what you think it means.” You can’t just build a bridge to the future (or the past for that matter) using 50% of the steel, 50% of the laborers paid 50% as much as normal, with 50% of the quality, in 50% of the time it usually takes, on 50% of the land you need, with only 50% of the engineering calculations finished. You can’t take half your meds and expect them to work. You can’t cut out half the cancer and call it a day. Sometimes you have to actually do a job right for it to work. Again, let’s try to rediscover what it means in America to put in a FULL day’s work and give a job 100%. Let’s try funding a program designed for X amount of dollars… with X amount of dollars, instead of 50% of X amount of dollars, so that it can function the way it was designed and work properly instead of failing and totally wasting that 50% of X dollars. It would be smarter and more efficient. And it would be a better way of honoring the kind of quality and craft that it could be argued Americans at one point valued. You can’t take away 50% of women’s rights and 50% of black votes and say that’s a good deal because you used the word “science.” That’s not going to fool anyone on our side. What does it look like when a country meets a conservative movement radicalized by white supremacy 50/50? It’s called Jim Crow. We’ve moved on from that, at least in part. What would it have been like if only 50% of Hitler’s fever dream had been achieved? Would it have been an acceptable bargain to spare all the lives of the Jews but still send them to prison camps and steal all of their wealth? Fifty percent of pure evil really isn’t an option, so unless the GOP can jettison the radicalized neonazi contingent that’s currently got a stranglehold over the party, then there’s not a good “scientific” basis for that kind of bargain. Just no.
6. What happened to “May the best (wo)man win?” Every time conservatives lose an election, they seem to all of a sudden demand that liberals split the winnings with them 50/50. But that offer is never on the table vice versa. It’s just not sincere, so it’s not interesting. Even in the social democracies I admire, capitalism is the true way of life. It’s just a more responsible, well-controlled, more humanitarian version of capitalism. But it’s not communism where the winners have to pay their taxes and then on top of that split the remaining half of their prize with the losers. Meeting liberals 50/50 would start with Republicans rebuilding the party of Eisenhower. So do that hard work and then come talk to us about hard work.
7. Conservatives these days honestly seem lost somewhere between Germany circa 1930 and Russia circa 1900. The thing they don’t seem to appreciate is that white conservatives already have the biggest affirmative action plan in the history of the world. Just 17% of our population in 26 rural red states run our Senate and can effectively veto anything the other 83% of us want to do. So now you want 50% more? And who’s arrogant? Who’s looking for handouts? Can all the white Southern men just please stop. I mean really… just stop. You’re making yourselves look really foolish and “unmanly.”
8. Many people keep saying we don’t know who to believe. That’s not true. I know who to believe because I know how responsible research is done. I did the hard work of learning how. There are no 100% perfect answers to most questions. There are some 99.8% answers, though. Scientists and academics know how much we don’t know so they know that almost anything that we say is “true” is really just a presentation of our most responsible, well researched, and most accurate sense to this date about what is so. But that doesn’t mean that this responsible assessment of truth is equivalent to an irresponsibly sourced or researched one. That’s why Trump’s Elite Strike Force of lawyers led by a graduate of Liberty University has lost 47 of their 48 cases, because a law degree from a conservative religious institution like that just isn’t as good as one from a real university, objectively speaking. They just haven’t done the hard work of building a body of knowledge based on legitimate sources. They chose a short cut, to be bigger fish in a smaller pond of inadequate far right Christian lawyers and other far right Christian professionals. The same is true at all levels of the conservative info-verse, which is why they have SO MUCH MORE fake news on their side than we do. They’re lazy and irresponsible when it comes to sourcing information. That just is what it is. They really just don’t respect hard work when it comes to science and other complex academic understandings, which is why they doth protest waaaaaay too much. Americans who do the hard work of learning how to do responsible research know who to believe. And you don’t need an actual degree to do that hard work. Many dishwashers have done it and know where to get real news and information to base sensible decisions on. It really does just come down to laziness, irresponsibility/self-entitlement, or willing ignorance on the right.
9. The “real working people” (ie the majority who do jobs that don’t pay great, since that seems to be the general meaning of this nonsense phrase) of America vote both Democratic and Republican. Democratic healthcare workers and Wal Mart employees are no less real working people than oil workers in the Permian Basin who vote Republican to preserve their paychecks (ie fossil fuel deregulation), often possibly despite their own more liberal personal beliefs if/when that’s the case. Condescension and arrogance are as American as apple pie, and it flows up and down the class structure in our country. The conservative white Evangelicals look down on all of us, with big smurking looks of condescension and without much reason to do so beyond their own deeply buried sense of inadequacy. Many academics look down on MAGA protestors (threatening and yes, murdering people with guns) with objectively more reason to do so. If it were up to me, I’d just erase the discussion of arrogance and condescension from the public debate because there’s just way too much of it in America for it to be anything more than a waste of time to try to pin it on any one demographic. By coincidence, most of my family is from Texas and wooooh boy. Chips on shoulders, man… big HUGE Texas-sized chips on shoulders.
10. Final point. Texans are Americans, so it is what it is. But there is a culture there of exaggerating the importance of their state and believing that they’re better for some reason. They’re honestly probably the very last people in America who should be leading a discussion about arrogance with a British comedian. Although, admittedly there are pockets of similar silliness in many other places here, just maybe not branded into the mythos of the entire state. Honestly, I think even many Texans would probably grudgingly admit it. As a former Texan, I just wanted to point that out if it wasn’t already self-evident. Obviously Matthew has a lot of other good things going for him and in general can be a pretty likable guy who makes great films by largely being an iconoclast just for the sake of it. Honestly, his voyages of self-discovery and his self-help advice are much less interesting to me personally, but he’s not an irredeemably silly person. For example, good luck with the new MLS team in Austin, buddy. Maybe focus a bit more on that because that’s a super cool thing we can all get behind. And when you rediscover the party of Eisenhower and we’ve built a truly representative democracy where everyone is represented relatively equally, call us up about that 50/50 bargain. Fair warning, we may not take you up on it, because it’ll probably be 2250 and we’ll already either be a social democracy or a dis-unioned Mad Max style dystopia deep fried in our own toxic stew of pollution and disease... and none of this will matter anymore anyway.