In recent interview with Chris Hayes, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman nimbly identified another piece of the jigsaw puzzle that helps explain the current insanity of the Republican party. Krugman was asked to comment on what Hayes called “...the single most deranged piece of COVID policy during the entire pandemic … DeSantis signing an order banning cruise ships from requiring vaccinations.” His response was priceless:
It turns out this whole freedom and free market thing is not what (Republicans) really care about. What they are talking about (now) is something quite different, and my guess is that it is privilege.
They have all this free market rhetoric, and then when businesses choose to do something responsible about a pandemic, all of a sudden, “we are going to crack down on business and force them to go the way we want them to”. ...
It’s a two-fer. It’s hard to think of anything stupider than not taking precautions on a cruise ship; and then whatever happened to the sacrosanct right of businesses, the private sector, to make its own choices. All of a sudden you have this draconian heavy-handed regulation, basically in the service of death.
… (There’s) this notion that certain types of people, basically white male Christians, are not supposed to be inconvenienced and are not supposed to make sacrifices — that’s for the other people. Vaccinations and mask wearing have become symbols of this horrible notion that maybe we are all in this together.
We know that privilege is not always a bad thing — some privileges (e.g. a driver’s license) can be earned (by passing tests) and also stripped away (by abusing the privilege). We also know that other privileges (e.g. white male rule) are often not earned by merit, and are sometimes stolen by force (e.g. colonization, slavery) and perpetuated by fraud (e.g. prejudices, traditions).
So it’s obvious that Krugman is talking about the illegitimate type of privilege. While there is little doubt that America’s founding fathers were perpetuators of white male privilege in many ways, thankfully they also gave us tools (“all men are created equal”, “we the people”, and “the consent of the governed”) to defeat any faction (e.g. Trumpism) that threatened our democratic form of government with an onslaught of demagoguery, fraud and sedition.
But why politeness? Do I really believe that good manners, fairness, and the golden rule has the power to defeat white privilege at this time in our nation’s history? I think it does if we can actually communicate its importance to red-voting Americans. The founders came from many different political backgrounds, but they understood the value and necessity of pulling together and compromising with each other.
In my opinion, left-leaning thinkers know how to be extraordinarily polite. Our TV pundits don’t yell at their guests, our opinion writers (more often than not) don’t disparage the individual propagandists who spew vicious lies — we simply point out how wrong and destructive those lies can be.
Why? Because we take our cues from the world of the law. Legislation never contains inflammatory language. Judges may use sharp words when criticizing a party who fails to follow rules, but they don’t sink to besmirching the transgressing individual themselves. Attorneys don’t accuse someone of negligence (or wrongdoing) if they don’t have facts to support their conclusions. At times, it appears the world of politics is straying away from the jurisprudence model, but we should encourage our elected representatives to hold firm and avoid the temptation to jump into the muck with the others who like it there.
And how do we deliver our message of hope and manners to the people who need to hear it the most? We (the Daily Kos army of communicators, and others we recruit) need to figure out how to get this message in front of them. Person-to-person is best, but we should also send snail mail, email, Facebook messages, and meet them on other platforms where they hang out. We won’t be successful every time, but we should try — especially to those red hatters we know well and care about. We can gradually disarm them by becoming the 21st Century version of the fairness doctrine that ably aided America’s quest for cohesiveness for more than 40 years in the last century.
I’ll close with a line from the 8th segment of the Harry Potter movie series. You can tell by context that the speaker is Professor Albus Dumbledore, but you may not remember the setting — the bright, other-worldly, and starkly empty Kings Cross station in London, where the spirits of the two dead characters are talking to each other.
Words are, Harry, in my not so humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic, capable of both inflicting injury and remedying it.
If Trump has the (magical) power to convince red-voters to believe his lies, we owe it to our country to make the attempt to convince those same voters (with our own word-inspired magic) how dangerous it is for them to continue believing those lies. Some polling indicates that Republican party membership may be declining. We must push that trend farther down the road and give the MAGA crowd something better to believe in — a deep understanding that we are indeed “all in this together”. The byproduct will be a functioning democracy, like the founders envisioned.