There is a Bible verse that says “Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right where everyone can see.” [Romans 12:17] Even for those who do not subscribe to the Christian faith, that is widely considered to be good advice, even though often difficult. We all know that Donald Trump absolutely rejects it, and returns evil for evil at every opportunity. Now there are liberals and progressives advocating that we do the same thing right back, since (in their view) being “nice” doesn’t work. They want to fight fire with fire, insult with insult, hate with hate.
I have a question: Do you have any friends who have orange hair? Any with small hands? Any who are overweight and out of shape?
How do you suppose those people, those friends of yours, feel when they read Trump being called disparaging names such as, oh, “the orange-haired one” or “fat slob,” or being ridiculed for his small hands? I can think of at least two things: first, they may look at that part of their body and at least feel defensive, if not exactly ashamed; second, they might look at it and think “People must think of Donald Trump when they look at me.”
Hate and insults do not win arguments, and often backfire. Justifying the very body-shaming that progressives say they are opposed to, just because Trump is such a bad person that he deserves it, has at least two possible bad effects. The first, as noted, is that you get some of it on people whom you didn’t mean to include. The second is that while insults directed at the other side may charge up your friends, they also tend to stiffen the resolve of your opponents. (A third thing is that the insult may drive away people who aren’t especially on either side yet.) There is a reason why coaches generally discourage players from making public comments that can be turned into “bulletin board material.” And I think we can agree that one of the more unfortunate tactical mistakes that Hillary Clinton made was accidentally popularizing the term “deplorables.” Clearly she meant to get decent people to see how bad Trump was, but she did not count on the number of people who would take the insult wrongly and respond defensively—people whom Hillary herself did not mean to include in the term, but who took it personally anyway.
People use insults because they are angry and they want to adequately express that anger. Fair enough. Trump gives decent people a lot to be angry about. But I used to warn my own children, when they were behaving as children often do, that anger tends to do two things to a person; one of them can be good, while the other is always bad. The good thing is that anger makes a person strong. But the bad thing is that anger can make a person stupid. The combination of strong and stupid can have highly unfortunate effects. Think “road rage.”
One of the things I like best about Daily Kos is that the diaries are almost always reasonable, well-thought-out, and both informative and persuasive. And even the ones that get angry generally display a controlled anger that gets the point across in a way that a visitor or a lurker will understand.
Almost always.
But when I read a screaming, insulting rant, even when I fundamentally agree with the point of it, I’m thinking that this may be good when shared among friends who share the viewpoint (which I realize is what Kos largely is), but it will probably have the same effect on a fair-minded conservative visitor, or an undecided voter, as most of the comments on Breitbart have on fair-minded liberals. I.e. “I want no part of that.”
Ah, but one might say that Kos exists for progressives to talk to progressives (true), and that conservatives are beyond reason anyway, so even trying to be nice to them is a complete waste of time and energy. This last is emphatically not true. Even if the percentage of persuadable conservatives is small, it is not zero, and every potential vote counts. In fact, I believe that Democrats running on the Democratic platform by rights ought to be winning national elections with at least 58% of the vote, maybe more, if Democrats could just learn to speak to ordinary conservative people the right way. (By which I do not mean compromising on anything of substance, but rather learning to use language which communicates with conservatives rather than turning them off. Things like abandoning the use of the term “pro-choice” and instead talking always about “freedom of conscience,” which means precisely the same thing but which Evangelicals see as a good thing.)
Remember, in the long run we cannot win elections by bludgeoning the other side into submission. The long-term path to victory is to persuade voters to voluntarily cast their votes for Democratic candidates and support their policies. Angry insults cannot accomplish that. Only gentle and reasonable and well-chosen words (verbal “non-violence”) will actually work in the long run.
Evan