I don’t write about people I know much, but one of my siblings is a self-professed moderate who views far left and far right as being equally bad and equally dangerous, and said so in a text message to me just yesterday. I don’t argue with him much because arguing with people over political attitudes is the best way to cement them in a person’s head, but I couldn’t let that slide.
I’m not going to deny that I have some minor issues with left wing progressives. But I’ve seen enough of the right-wing insanity over the past couple decades to know that there’s no real comparison between the two. I suspect that most of my sibling’s repugnance is that he was treated very obnoxiously by some progressives while he was attending graduate school, and thus he is holding a grudge which predisposes him to think just as poorly of them as he does of the right-wing crazies.
Anyway, getting back to the point of my article, there’s no way to justify any statement that the far left is as bad as the far right. The example I gave my sibling is that we have never seen an attempt to overthrow an election by anyone on the left. His response was a half-hearted “well if the circumstances were right they’d do the same thing”, which I think he knew was a weak argument.
Yeah, sure, it’s theoretically possible to drive anyone into revolting against an existing system. But it’s no longer theoretical in the case of the right-wing of the country. And it’s not simply a splinter minority of crazy people, either. We have tens of millions of people primed to accept it if Trump or some wannabe could figure out how to engineer it.
That wasn’t the only thing I could have listed, of course, but one thing I’ve recently learned is that it’s better to simply state a truth than to try to argue with someone about it. If you state a truth and refuse to argue with someone who doesn’t accept it, it blocks them from being able to pretend their arguments are superior. I mean, they still can in their own minds, but they don’t get to rehearse it with you against the actual truth.
So I don’t argue with him when he comes up with stuff that I consider nonsensical navel-gazing. He’s pretty smart, but has the tendency a lot of smart people share to get stuck admiring their own reasoning. So not giving him the opportunity to argue with me means he gets to chew on it for a while instead, and that does more to shift his thinking than I could ever hope to accomplish by trying to batter him into submission.
Will it work with everyone? Probably not — some people are invincible in their stupidity, and will continue to believe it even in the face of their own actual demise. But doing it this way takes advantage of the brain’s tendency towards caching information. If you just say something, and they don’t get the chance to argue, then it’s in their brain without the countering argument pathways getting reinforced at the same time.