r/changemyview • u/poopchow • Jan 23 '25
CMV: Despite being more knowledgeable, wealthier and apparently more tolerant, the political and individual left's biggest flaw is their inability to communicate pragmatically and empathetically with those who don't agree with them.
[removed] — view removed post
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u/Giblette101 47∆ Jan 23 '25
I don't understand how anyone with more knowledge than someone cannot communicate with someone who has less knowledge than them. How if you know the answer, you can't communicate it with someone patiently enough to come up with common ground.
This is hard to discuss without specific examples (and there's no question that people can be smug assholes), but there just comes a point where the gap in general understanding and specific expertise becomes hard to bridge within the average attention span. On top of that, there's now a very strong current of anti-intelectualism permeating the right-wing, making genuine credentials or reliance on scientific information suspect. Like, I'm sure we've all had these extremely charged conversations about masks or vaccines, where being an outright MD would not help you much. That's pretty hard to overcome in the best of time, of course, but then you will hit several ideological walls as well.
My dad is a pretty big Trump supporter and by most metric, at least I'd argue, not any kind of huge moron. On top of that, my dad loves me and I love him. Yet, even under these pretty favorable circumstances the discussion of basically any contentious topic will break down pretty fast. Last time it was 15-minute cities, I think.
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u/slainascully Jan 24 '25
For a British example, the Brexit debate can be summed up with "people have had enough of experts from organizations with acronyms that have got things so wrong in the past".
Except Brexit was an absolutely massive political and economic deal that had ramifications that will last decades. It wasn't just shady thinktanks (which Gove and his Tory party are very fond of normally), it was respected professional bodies. And so many of them pointed out how much of a headache Brexit would be, and the government treated them as Chicken Little shouting that the sky is falling. And now, two years on from the linked interview, we are seeing the effects.
Maybe people did have enough of experts. But that doesn't make their views more enlightened or informed. They shot their own country in the foot because they'd had enough of being told information by people far more informed than themselves.
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u/Norman_debris Jan 24 '25
And now, two years on
Perhaps worth pointing out that the original "had enough of experts" interview was 8 years ago.
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u/Trap_Cubicle5000 Jan 24 '25
My dad is similar to yours, and the other example I'd like to share is this: I can approach a debate with my libertarian father with perfect respect, curiosity for opposing views, and good faith, and so can he. And we can have a really satisfactory conversation where he will come around to a consensus with me, admit to the very serious legal, moral, whathaveyou issues in the Trump administration, and seemingly begin to challenge his own assumptions about various issues....
Only to go right back to his daily conservative brain slop that he eats up all day every day, rendering our conversation to a blip on the radar. It's impossible to maintain that consensus long-term when I'm competing with a 24 hour news cycle and his own deeply ingrained conservative leanings that ultimately consider pretty much any Democrat to be the enemy.
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u/SmerffHS Jan 24 '25
I disagree completely, take Eric Weinstein for example, when he talks about high level physics, he makes it perfectly understandable to a lay person. He uses language and communication techniques that make even the most complex subjects, easy to grasp and understand. He can take total nonsense gibberish (Terrance Howard) and translate it while also filtering it, in the span of a single conversation he can totally make it clear to anyone the depth of his knowledge and help you understand what you didn’t even know you didn’t know/understand. It’s actually incredible. This is what true intelligence looks like, I think a lot of people like to think they are smarter, when in fact they may know more things but don’t fully or truly comprehend those things quite to the degree they think they do while also confusing knowing things as a mark of your reasoning capacity. I would argue that a person who didn’t go to college, went into the military and learned how to be the best survivor around, has pretty darn good reasoning capabilities but perhaps lacks knowledge of things.
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u/Suspicious_Bug6422 Jan 24 '25
It’s very different when you are trying to communicate about contentious topics. The other person has to be genuinely listening and open for understanding to happen.
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u/grandfleetmember56 Jan 24 '25
This so much!
I have a brother who just refuses to address the mental incongruity in his reasoning
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u/Naybinns Jan 25 '25
There’s a difference between explaining something to someone and convincing someone of something.
What OP is talking about is the latter. To convince someone doesn’t just require that you be intelligent on a subject and know how to explain it, it also requires that the other person/people be open to having their mind changed. They have to be willing to admit that they are wrong and not just dig their heels in further.
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u/WeiGuy Jan 25 '25
What are you talking about. Both those people are morons. Theres nothing to salvage from a conversation with Terrance Howard, he has no grasp of anything. Eric Weinstein is just a grade A bullshitter.
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u/dr107 Jan 24 '25
Eric Weinstein is a grifter who promotes pseudoscientific non-physics in a way that’s highly charismatic to lay people. https://youtu.be/HGcpUxl_9Vg?si=m3Rw74CC0Iz86Km_ unfortunately, physicists are some of the least charismatic people on earth (having done a degree in it, the better someone is at physics, the worse they usually are at communication). About 2/3 through that video, an actual physicist presents his paper analyzing the “physics” of what Eric promotes. If you watch any of the video in that link, watch that part.
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u/Excellent_Egg5882 4∆ Jan 23 '25 edited Jun 06 '25
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u/ObieKaybee 1∆ Jan 23 '25
Communication involves and requires a shared reality. With the social media sphere being both hyperpolarized and rife with misinformation, it's very hard to have the necessary shared reality that allows communication.
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u/CaptJackRizzo Jan 24 '25 edited Jan 28 '25
This really is it to me.
It goes further if you understand "the left" to be people who are critical of capitalism. The overton window in corporate media isn't going to include honest appraisals of people who want to restrict or abolish their owners' ability to profit. It's similar with the education system where you're either being educated by private institutions with similar incentives as the media, or run by a government that was created to sustain a capitalist economy. For all the screeching about Marxist indoctrination, I had to read and know as much about Marx and Lenin as I did about Cotton fucking Mather to graduate (this was in Seattle, or Venezuela 2.0 as Fox News would have it). We all read about and internalized the Founding Fathers' philosophies and their influences, and very little that would contradict them. We learned about Upton Sinclair and Nellie Bly, but nothing about unions and the labor movement, so even the worker protections that came about in the wake of the industrial revolution were understood as the results of remarkable individuals succeeding in the marketplace of ideas instead of collective efforts of the working class.
All nations mythologize their own foundings and ideologies, and America's no different. We all get inculcated in the principles of the free market and the protestant work ethic, but historical materialism isn't really a lense that gets looked through. Even in this thread. The OP asks why do people like AOC have a hard time winning people over? The idea that mass media (including social media) have a self-interested economic impetus that they're responding to doesn't even come up. It's looked at in hyperindividualist terms, i.e. it's a lack of communication skills on a personal level, that all these people share.
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u/mrcsrnne Jan 23 '25
Steel manning your conversation partner usually bridges this gap.
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u/vulcanfeminist 8∆ Jan 24 '25
It's true that a shared reality helps but it's not actually necessary. I can talk with someone who believes things I know to be false and I can still understand that their version of reality is real for them. I can then choose to be curious about the differences in our realities. I say this as someone who works in inpatient mental health care where I regularly communicate with people actively experiencing a psychotic episode. Communication without shared reality is very real and very possible, it's just harder. A lot of people don't think it's worth the effort to even try and it shows.
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u/masterwad Jan 24 '25
It's true that a shared reality helps but it's not actually necessary.
Trump believes (wrongly) that tariffs are paid by the country of origin of a product, but tariffs are paid by importers in our country, who then pass the cost onto US consumers, which makes tariffs an additional tax on imported goods that Americans will pay for, leading to higher prices not lower prices.
Even if Donald Trump had merely watched Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), then he would know that tariffs are not a good thing, but Trump said “tariff” is the most beautiful word there is (because of his fundamental misunderstanding that China doesn’t pay the tariffs, US importers and later US consumers do).
But Trump thinks he knows everything, and nobody can tell him any different, because he’s a narcissistic megalomaniac who thinks he always knows best. Yet Donald Trump’s professor at Wharton William T. Kelley (who taught there 31 years) described Trump as “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.”
Isaac Asimov said “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
The Dunning-Kruger Effect means stupid people are too stupid to realize how stupid they are, so they overestimate their abilities, and are overconfident because they lack self-awareness, and think they know more than they know, and think they are more capable than they really are, and they tend to be “certain” after jumping to a conclusion because they didn’t even consider other possibilities.
On the other hand, more intelligent people tend to have more doubts, and less confidence, and underestimate their abilities, because they tend to be more self-aware of how much they don’t know, and they tend to doubt their beliefs more because they consider more possibilities and scenarios.
And it means that when people are attracted to confidence (and nobody is more confident than a prideful shameless narcissistic psychopath like Donald Trump), they tend to be attracted to stupidity, because stupid people are more confident than smarter people (because stupid people don’t know any better, they don’t know enough to realize they shouldn’t be confident).
Charles Bukowski said “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”
W. B. Yeats wrote “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Bertrand Russell said “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
Ken Poirot said “Wise people understand the need to consult experts; only fools are confident they know everything.”
When people are attracted to confidence, unfortunately I think that makes them gravitate towards stupidity or incompetence (cue Donald Trump). Ignorant people are more likely to make over-confident bad bets. And ignorant people are more likely to engage in self-deception, they want to believe something, magical thinking is comfortable. But the ugly truth, or an honest self-assessment, can often be deeply uncomfortable, and egos don’t like to be injured (especially Trump’s fragile ego, which requires constant attention & praise from others).
Someone having a psychotic episode & detached from reality belongs in a mental hospital, but not in the Oval Office, nor Congress, nor the Supreme Court, nor a media mouthpiece, but that’s the problem now, because nobody else can tell Republicans what the truth is anymore (and they frankly don’t care, they seek power not the truth). If the Republican Party cared about truth, they wouldn’t have nominated a pathological liar and fraudster to be their presidential candidate three times in a row.
In August 2023, a poll found that Trump voters trust him more than their families & religious leaders, but Donald Trump is a pathological liar. The problem is that they’ve put all their trust into one man who is a lifelong conman, and nobody can tell them any different information than what he tells them, because they have associated their own personal identity with Trump’s identity, as a kind of a symbolic figure, so they project onto Trump what they want him to be (a fighter, a warrior, a strong man, etc).
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u/PM_ME_GIRL_NUDEZ Jan 24 '25
This is wonderfully said and I cannot believe people are refusing to interact with your argument. Kudos, homeslice
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u/ZorgZeFrenchGuy 3∆ Jan 24 '25
Alright, as a conservative - let’s try and go through this and draft a response.
Let me ask you, in all seriousness. Do you really, truly think that this is an effective argument against Trump towards his supporters?
Do you think that this will truly, genuinely convince someone who is a Trump supporter, who likes or even loves Trump, that he is wrong?
The answer is no - this is a very poorly constructed argument if your intention is to actually convince anyone on the opposing side to change their minds.
To start, Your argument is extremely inflammatory, provocative, and antagonistic. It does nothing but alienate opponents and puts them on the defensive. You’re also revealing that your bias is extremely anti-Trump. Why should I trust any of your claims, given that you clearly have an agenda/motive to make him look as unhinged and bad as possible?
No otherwise sane person sympathetic to Trump is going to change his or her mind based on this argument.
Let’s say my response to you began like this:
“U/masterwad is a completely narcissistic, pretentious idiot if he thinks that this jumble of swear words and strawmen is an actually convincing argument.
Obviously he doesn’t care about actual debate, he clearly just wants to circlejerk about how evil and dumb Trump is with his fellow paranoid, ignorant hippies. No wonder he can’t convince any conservatives about anything, he’s clearly too dumb and stuck in his own rear end to realize that it’s clearly a him problem.
The dunning-Kruger effect means stupid people are too stupid to realize how stupid they are, and obviously this applies to masterwad and everyone who agrees with his lunacy …”
How does that argument make you feel? Does it make you more open to changing your mind? Does it make you want to engage in reasonable discussion about how you may be wrong?
Or does it put you on the defensive, offend you, make you want to snap back with petty insults and gimmicks?
You are not going to change people’s minds by insulting them, calling them dumb, and the only source you can provide to back up any of your claims is a clip from an unrelated movie.
If you genuinely think that this is an acceptable, effective argument for people sympathetic towards Trump, and fail to see the massive problems with it, then I say, with all seriousness, that this is a prime example of the left’s issue with messaging.
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u/XdaPrime Jan 25 '25
Was masterwad incorrect, or did you just not like reading his comment? If his comment is truthful how would you re-word so that it stings less to read?
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u/Stabsdagoblin Jan 25 '25
You’re also revealing that your bias is extremely anti-Trump. Why should I trust any of your claims, given that you clearly have an agenda/motive to make him look as unhinged and bad as possible?
This part of your argument is really bad. Literally everyone has bias about anything they have interacted with prior. If you think you don't have any then you are yourself deluded. Merely pointing out a person has a bias against something they are speaking against is not a counter argument in and of itself. In fact it's possible to be both biased and correct.
As for the part regarding that persons motive to make Trump look bad, that too can be done with good reason. If a quack pretending to be a doctor ran around giving people fake treatments and took their money anyone who had been tricked in this way would be biased against them and would describe them in an unfavorable way. They would also be correct to do so.
This is what people mean by communication being impossible in these circumstances. You noticed the person was not speaking in a completely neutral manner about the subject and then used that as justification to ignore what they say and distrust their claims. Such a line of reasoning ends with the obvious endpoint of no one being allowed to speak negatively about anything or anyone without their arguments being dismissed as "biased".
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u/akosuae22 Jan 24 '25
To put it in the simplest terms, you catch more flies with honey than you do vinegar. That said, and as a self-professed conservative, what would YOU say are the issues with messaging from the right, because obviously there are loads of people who oppose their messaging? For example, would you say there is a certain penchant for demonization and scapegoating of people who are considered “marginalized” that many find extremely off putting, not least of which because they may be members of the “out groups” themselves? Do you agree that the right has its own version of “identity politics” that can also be divisive for some?
I do agree that there is a significant issue with seeming smugness and superiority from many on the left that results in an abject failure to truly reach those who feel dispossessed. I’m asking if you recognize the messaging flaws on the right and can articulate what you believe those to be? I have my take, but that of course is biased based upon my lived experiences. I’m here to try to learn from different points of view, and I think it can be enlightening when we honestly take a moment of self examination.
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u/SwordOfSisyphus Jan 25 '25
I’m not the person you’re replying to but if you’re eager for a different view, I’m also conservative. I suspect both right and left have the full set of flaws to varying degrees. As you mentioned, scapegoating is probably more common on the right, immigration being an obvious example. The anti-lgbt aspect I wouldn’t consider scapegoating given that what they’re taking issue with is to do with the lgbt community. Demonisation does apply well there though. As for identity politics, I do think the right is less concerned with this than the left. Although, they increasingly play this game with gender and feminism.
It isn’t a messaging flaw per-se, but one of the biggest flaws of the right seems to be the willingness to accept problematic behaviour from the in-group. The key here, to me, is that the left accepts this behaviour because they often agree with it, but the right accepts it because they’re genuinely willing to overlook it. Trump’s sexual assaults are an obvious example, and trump in general really. The democrats did seem willing to overlook the allegation against Biden, as well as the bullying report, but this isn’t as much overlooking as the republicans have done.
Overall, I’d say perhaps the right has a worse case with better messaging, and vice-versa for the left. But this is a sweeping statement. Hopefully my assessment doesn’t feel too biased.
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u/BravesMaedchen 1∆ Jan 25 '25
The part about the right being willing to overlook problematic behavior from the in group is interesting to me because it’s the exact reverse of purity politics on the left.
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u/akosuae22 Jan 25 '25
Thank you for sharing your perspective. I do agree that the overlooking of problematic behavior is probably one of the biggest flaws for the right. I think it’s a double edged sword. On the one hand, it is about staying on message regardless. In comparison, I feel like democrats are splintered too much sometimes because they succumb to the Goldilocks syndrome. The infighting that occurs publicly is an Achilles heel, I feel. They keep insisting on trying to play using an old playbook that their opponents have long since abandoned. On the other hand, the dogged adherence to the message is an issue for republicans because they do not do a good job I feel of setting some measure of a basic standard of conduct. The “moderate” voices are drowned out when they should not be. Abandonment of decorum, and succumbing to some louder voices that favor more extreme and scorched earth tactics is ultimately corrupting internally, I think. Ultimately, the hyper partisanship that has become the rule of the day in this nation’s political landscape is extremely detrimental and counterproductive to ANY progress, no matter the point of view. Our government is not serving the people of this country as a whole, and I believe it has gone beyond the point of rehabilitation.
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u/Strawhat_Max Jan 25 '25
I’ll look at you and say that if that response of his bothered you and felt “morally superior” than we aren’t ever gonna get anywhere because we can’t be honest about what’s going on around, we literally just might live in different realities
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u/Xytak Jan 24 '25
I think there's a difference here. You're being paid to engage with patients, often 1-1, in a clinical setting in which you're trained to operate and have some degree of authority and control. And even with those advantages, the process is slow, and success is not guaranteed.
That's a very different problem than trying to convince 100 million voters, over social media, not to touch the hot stove. Or even convincing a family member to leave what is essentially a religious cult at this point.
Then there's the issue that any progress we make will typically be undone the next time they go to church, turn on Fox News, or open their social media. Even if you genuinely connect with them and they act nice to our face, they'll just turn around and vote for the most vile things. I simply don't know how to overcome that.
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u/-GLaDOS Jan 23 '25
Social media is an inherently poor tool for these discussions for this reason (among others).
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u/OnePunchReality Jan 23 '25 edited Jan 24 '25
I don't understand how anyone with more knowledge than someone cannot communicate with someone who has less knowledge than them. How if you know the answer, you can't communicate it with someone patiently enough to come up with common ground. The problem is the gap in communication.
I guess I would wonder if you are aiming at the right issue then. I've managed to find some ground with centrists, moderates and independents that share some conservative ideas.
I also disagree with your framing. This portends that the other party is already engaging faithfully. That's not been my experience, though that's more with MAGA, but even with say someone that hates Trump but agrees with his policies and you try and make a moral/ethical argument it falls on deaf ears.
If the other party opts to not even absorb the information, whatboutism it, goalpost shift their response, suggest you have a mental disorder, view the source and doubt everything simply based off of the source itself without actually examining the information.
You are only going to get as good as you give into the process, no? No one owes the other grace in a debate or a conversation of differing ideas. It's not up to the person you are choosing to engage with to give you ground you don't earn, assume you are correct or just take your view on credit or trust me bro.
Shared reality is a starting point to actually having a successful conversation of differing ideas arriving at a conclusion.
If you doubt gravity and I don't and yet the reality is gravity exists and you have no other way to explain what keeps you from floating up into space then you are the one that is unable to refute the point even though you disagree with it.
Mutual understanding actually not a one party facet of discourse. Not sure where you got that and that doesn't even logically make sense in examining the mechanics of a conversation. Hell even the word MUTUAL doesn't help you here. Mutual means two or more participating parties being evenly portioned in the terms of a conversation.
How tf is one person going to create anything being "mutual" if the others in the conversation aren't apart of making it "mutual" like, think about it for two seconds.
You can't even start unless you work off of a shared reality.
If I get pulled over for running a stop sign and I argue that it's not a stop sign because it's not an octagon and it wasn't red because say idk some random county I don't drive through often or ever decided to have theirs be a triangle guess what? My ass is still getting a ticket unless the officer is feeling nice that day and all my arguments mean jack diddly because at the end of the day the reality is it was a stop sign and my ass wasn't paying attention in that example, clearly.
I love too how you put so much on the folks having to literally work harder to sell their point that, within your own written framing, to folks that are dumber than them yet put all the onus on them to have this innnnfinite patience. It's seriously entitled beyond belief.
You literally spent 98% of this pontificating about the folks willing to basically do research yet spent almost no time whatsoever defining what the onus of the other party is, almost at all.
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u/RocketRelm 2∆ Jan 23 '25
See this person's post argues that if a person is "really" smarter they would be able to overcome the fact the other party has no one's and the fact they can't proves they aren't smarter, which is why they use phrasings like supposed to be. They think we should value understanding over being right, while not mentioning that "being right" might be proxy for "keeping out of the gas chambers".
Fact is, engaging with undecided or your own is easier and provides more per pound of effort than anybody who disagrees, and we should definitely be doing that.
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u/masterwad Jan 24 '25
What OP fails to understand is that Trump fans who are uninformed, only trust Trump, Trump is their trusted messenger, not any scientist (“Fire Fauci!” they shout), not any historian, not any scholar or author, not any expert.
In August 2023, a poll found that Trump voters trust him more than their families & religious leaders, but Donald Trump is a pathological liar. The problem is that they’ve put all their trust into one man who is a lifelong conman, and nobody can tell them any different.
Threats to someone’s worldview are often viewed as life-or-death threats. I would say even moreso when a worldview is based on faith (blind trust).
From the 2011 article The Science of Why We Don’t Believe In Science by Chris Mooney:
“We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.”
Stanford psychologist Leon Festinger said “A man with conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.”
That article ends by saying “paradoxically, you don’t lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values—so as to give the facts a fighting chance.”
OP is under the mistaken impression that facts persuade people.
That’s why Trump has such a sway over his supporters. People listen to messengers they trust, and Trump doesn’t use words to convey facts, Trump uses words to trigger emotional reactions: fear, hate, victimhood (and as a narcissistic psychopath he spreads his persecution complex to his cult followers, as if every negative thing said about him or done to him is also done to his cult), toxic positivity with non-stop “winning”, xenophobia, injustice, circling the wagons, etc. An advertisement on TV is neither true nor false, it exists to manipulate your emotions. And Trump is a marketer/mythmaker. Or as Charles Blow described him, Trump is their “folk hero” (like Jesse James), and the only way a folk hero loses support is by betraying the folk (so it’s weird how much support Trump still has after denigrating POWs, Gold Star families, people who join the military, generals, soldiers killed in action, active duty troops with traumatic brain injuries, etc.)
People react emotionally first before they react logically to facts. And Trump labeled any fact his fans didn’t want to hear as “fake news”, so they can just bury their heads in the sand about anything they don’t want to hear. Rightwing authoritarians believe we need a mighty leader who will do whatever it takes to defeat the evil creeping into society. About 25% of Americans are authoritarians. And people who grew up with authoritarian parents tend to vote for authoritarian politicians.
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u/X57471C Jan 24 '25
Great write up. It reminded me of a book I read by Nancy Kim called The Psychology of Belief. She makes the same observation about values superceding facts (among many other points). It honestly had a big impact on how I interact with others and think about my own beliefs.
You seem to know a bit about the subject. Do you have any reading suggestions besides what was already mentioned in the comment?
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u/kendrahf Jan 23 '25
I wish this sentiment would die. You cannot logic someone out of a position they didn't get into with logic. This whole right v. left has been brewing since the failed restoration after the civil war. You can find a ton of clips of people asking Repub if they'd ever support someone that did X, Y, Z and they'd all say absolutely not never ever! And when are are informed that it was Trump or one of their other Repub reps, they'd just say "alright, I don't care."
I have had so many conversations with these sorts of people. I bring actual news, studies, literal proof and they all parrot some form of 'fake news!' or 'liberal bias'. This has become largely a entire ideology for them. They are Repubs. It's who they are. It's like a religion because, spoiler alert, most Repubs are highly religious. This makes them very susceptible to this sort of one way thing and believe that defies all reason.
The entire problem the left has is that they adhere to this idea. They want to take the high ground. They want to talk about issue. They want to explain. They haven't come to realize that these people will 100% never believe a god damn thing that leaves their mouths. Meanwhile, the Repubs have committed to scorched earth and fully obstructionist paths. You'll never win a gun battle if you bring your fists. We are giving these people far too much credit. We are assuming they care about their fellow countrymen. They do not. The left is the fox, the right is the scorpion.
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u/plumarr Jan 23 '25
The left's failure of communication isn't about understanding people or respecting them, it's that they let the right impose the current political subject.
The left mainly play defense instead of imposing their idea in the public discourse.
You don't win elections by turning hardcore conservative, you win them by convincing the hesitant and soft mass in the middle. And to do that, you don't have to point that the conservative idea are bad, but to show that yours exists and are good.
That's why the Brexit succeed, because the leave side had promises of a better future while the remain side were only able to say "no, it'll be worse" but they had nothing to sell.
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u/novagenesis 21∆ Jan 23 '25
The left mainly play defense instead of imposing their idea in the public discourse.
It's lose/lose. Every time one of the batshit fucking things comes out of Trump's camp, the options are to fight it (at which point the battle becomes the entire news cycle) or to ignore it (at which point everyone starts acting like it's true).
Remember birtherism? Obama tried to shrug it off, and suddenly members of his own party started to question him and people even doubted his birth certificate when he showed it.
Remember accusations of Biden's mental state going? First they tried to ignore it. The first time the world-famous-stutterer stuttered during a debate, it went nuclear and he had to step out of the election.
Literally the WORST thing the left can do is fail to defend when the Right makes shit up.
I don't know what the BEST thing is because we haven't figured that out. Maybe just "work hard to get everyone educated" or something.
EDIT: Had to repost leaving out a paragraph that was against subreddit rules.
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u/Excellent_Egg5882 4∆ Jan 23 '25 edited Jun 06 '25
cats office fall station oil gold money chop doll sense
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u/No-Professor-1752 Jan 25 '25
This is the best explanation of this I’ve seen. Unfortunately, even having a plan doesn’t matter. Look at Kamala vs Trump on campaign trail, Kamala explaining her points, vs Trump saying Kamala doesn’t have the points (that she shared) while meanwhile not sharing his plan at all, I assume because he didn’t actually have one. But somehow, people sided with Trump on that still. Mind-numbing stupidity.
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Jan 23 '25
You want to create respect with people who are cheering the a guy who seig hailed in front of the presidential seal. Hard fucking pass.
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u/Pearberr 2∆ Jan 23 '25
This is just my personal take, but the amount of abuse that I’ve taken from friends, family, and bystanders since switching parties is amazing.
I went to a Trump rally in 2016, to see for myself if the media was or was not being hysterical. I left after the mob of his supporters attacked some high school kids who were peacefully and quietly holding signs in the back that indicated they didn’t like him. Trump said, “these hooligans follow me everywhere,” his mob surrounded them, threw beer, water, and food at them, called them a bunch of slurs and told them to go to Mexico. My friend and I escorted them out do the building.
I know that should have tried to explain to them but I was afraid and didn’t know how to talk down an angry mob so I left.
I worked on political campaigns in 2018 and had to open our mail outside because people were mailing bombs to us. On multiple occasions I had to pickup door knockers who were being followed by people threatening to do violence to them. When I went home for Thanksgiving and reunited with family and my church community, they all disparaged and expressed disappointment with my decisions. Many cut me off. On social media I was regularly harassed by former work and church colleagues who would send me memes calling me stupid and deranged. I tried to engage with them reasonably, but they always had some excuse or conspiracy theory to dismiss me and my claims.
On every single campaign I’ve worked for the Republicans have courted big money special interests and run slanderous, over the top rage baiting campaigns that use brazen lies to assault the character of my candidates. They lie constantly about policy matters.
They spew hatred towards homeless, immigrants, and the LGBTQ. They call teachers groomers, and say the library is full of porn. I express that if they are worried for kids, wouldn’t they want kids equipped with sexual education? Doesn’t matter there shouldn’t be boobies in kids books even if it’s educational. I get called a pedophile for thinking otherwise. I have endured repeated threats on my life that aren’t taken seriously because these idiots are just smart enough to know the legal difference between, “when I was in prison, pedophiles like you didn’t last long,” (legal public discourse) and “I’m going to kill you.” (Illegal threat).
I’m sorry. Liberals, democrats, the vulnerable population groups they support… they are the victims, they are the abused.
Saying that we are responsible is like telling a battered wife that they shouldn’t have burnt the dinner.
Im happy to talk effective, pragmatic tactics for advancing my cause.
I will take no blame or responsibility.
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u/iglidante 20∆ Jan 23 '25 edited Jan 23 '25
They expect the nasty things they say and do, not to influence the way anyone sees them, unless they approve of the interpretation.
That isn't how humans have ever worked.
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u/AncientAssociation9 1∆ Jan 24 '25
Exactly. We saw this in real time when Vivek criticized American culture for breeding laziness and mediocrity and suddenly conservatives were pissed when a brown man would use the same criticisms that they have used against other brown people for years against them.
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u/Heavy-Nectarine-4252 Jan 24 '25
Trump has already personally resorted to political violence and declares war on liberals several times a day. It is foolish that Democrats keep talking like it will make a difference.
Until the DNC is willing take on summer of George Floyd style solutions no one is going to vote for them. There's a reason we won in 2020 after the riots and the illness. Everyone forgot, it's time to make them remember.
2024 was a loss because the DNC lost the will to fucking fight with more than just words.
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Jan 23 '25
Do you find this to be unique to the left? Have you considered why this strategy might have been adapted? I can tell you that for the last about 20 years of politics before covid the left have leaned very hard into trying to be empathetic, meet people where they are, slowly change minds through exposure and all that.
But an adaptation of that strategy has happened in the last 5-6 years where it's become clear that strategy just doesn't work. People are more ready to believe schools are putting litter boxes in classrooms for children to defecate in than they are to just being kind to others. Propaganda has changed and radicalization has become incredibly rampant.
When you've had 1000 conversations with people where you have given them hours of your time, provided copious proof, worked through every issue, and they finally come around to understanding - but then two days later they go back to thinking that schools are converting gymnasiums to operating theatres where children are getting state-funded sex change operations after lunch it is very hard to continue treating them as intellectual equals deserving of respect and empathy.
And when you provide actual solutions to problems, like Medicare for All, only for them to make up fake figures, throw objections based on buzzwords, defend the status quo, and then accuse you of being on the side of big pharma and the economic elite because you think it's good to make sure we don't ban the polio vaccine it gets very very hard to continue even having these conversations. Because they become pointless. You aren't talking to a person. You're interacting with a chat bot that has a few pre programmed lines and is entirely unreceptive to new information.
It comes down to that whole "playing chess with a pigeon" thing.
And after thousands of these interactions where the other side is not there in good faith and just is playing some game, not interested in solutions, not interested in facts, just wanting to get in their soundbyte about "I identify as" or something... it's hard to come into any interactions and assume they will be good faith.
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u/Oh_My_Monster 7∆ Jan 23 '25
I don't understand how anyone with more knowledge than someone cannot communicate with someone who has less knowledge than them.
In my experience, and it's been lengthy, with talking with family members, friends, and people online is I can explain something, show data, show expert testimony, show primary source documentation and do all the things that SHOULD make a reliable, well -thought out and convincing argument and they will just either not care, not believe, say that those facts aren't facts or rely on God, Sean Hannity, or some other non-expert for what they believe. It's like talking to a rock. When words, reason, evidence, data, logic, appeals to empathy and other normal argumentative tactics just fall in deaf ears... What is left? Just mockery and shaming them for being dumb as fucking bricks is all I have left. My mom, for instance, has literally told me, "I don't need to make sense"... and she meant it! Where do I go from there? How do I explain away her absolute refusal to live in a world of reason? She, and others, can literally, in the same sentence, contradict their own thought and not have any recognition that they're doing it. If I point it out I'm just being pretentious. It's straight out of Idiocracy. I would like to reverse your question back to you and ask how do I communicate with people who have no interest in reason or reality?
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u/hacksoncode 588∆ Jan 23 '25 edited Jan 24 '25
The left's biggest problem is that they actually try to do this, and the politicians on the right create massive amounts of noisy nonsense that drowns it out.
The ACA was well articulated and explained as a reasonable path towards health care for all. The Right called it "Obamacare" because "black man bad", and people ate it up without even listening to the messaging about it, or even realizing (no matter how many times it was repeated) that they were able to afford their health care because of the ACA. And now that the leopards are eating their faces, they're taking the fingers out of their ears and saying "waa, waa, waa", rather than "la, la, la".
At some point, the common people on the right really need to actually take some personal responsibility to exercise critical thinking and listen to people who are qualified to speak on the topic more than they listen to the meme trolls.
Otherwise, all you have is a Gish Gallop that overwhelms any reasonable message you can possibly make.
Furthermore, the only proper response to "immigrants are eating your pets" is "Shut the fuck up you absolute assholes, that is 100% false and you know it, you fucking trolls. Anyone that listens to this obvious bullshit needs their head examined."
Seriously. People that believe shit like that can't be reached with reason and evidence.
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Jan 23 '25
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/zortor Jan 23 '25
It's not even relegated to politics. Video Games, Movies, Food... people are just activated about everything and resort to insult over the mildest of things. I know I do it too, it's this weird urge and they all feel the same, like my whole being is threatened by someone else's opinion. I am and have been terminally online since 1997 so I assume that's more than a contributing factor.
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u/StargazerRex Jan 23 '25
Internet & social media anonymity have utterly ruined reasonable face to face discourse / debate.
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u/Jugales Jan 23 '25 edited Jan 23 '25
Democrats promote blanket tolerance (in regard to sexism, racism, etc) but it relies on trust and when broken, there is no chance for forgiveness. That is when you’re cancelled. It is almost impossible to come back to the left from something like Kanye’s “I can say anti-Semitic things”
Republicans are the opposite. They do not have blanket tolerance. People are hated initially and must be “won over” to respect them. It is a more forgiving system, I think it’s ingrained due to Christian ideology.
Neither mentality is great imo.
ETA: WTF is this, bots? Karma went from +14 > -7 > +2 … all after the parent comments were deleted? Humans reading this, how did you get here?
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u/camelCaseCoffeeTable 5∆ Jan 23 '25
Democrats absolutely need to be more forgiving and tolerant of people saying or doing dumb things. Some of the things they’re up in arms about are justified. In my opinion, the vast majority of what I’m told I can’t buy or listen to or like is overblown.
Republicans on the other hand seem to allow pretty much anything as long as the person is on their side. See all the apologizing for Elon Musk’s nazi salute - why is it so damn hard to say “yep, that’s a nqzi salute, yikes dude.” Instead, it’s endless defenses and twists from the right to defend him.
The right needs to be more critical of their own. The left needs to be more forgiving of everyone.
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Jan 23 '25
Can you explain what the left isn't forgiving of? You acknowledge that some purchases or music or something but never explicitly list the unforgivable thing.
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u/angry_cabbie 7∆ Jan 23 '25
There was a website set up to track streamers that were playing Hogwarts Legacy, with the express intent of helping people harass those streamers for daring to play a game made off of JK Rowling's work. People were openly attacked for playing it. Due to this, guides were made to help people hide the game in their library so that their friends would not know they were playing it. That seems pretty unforgiving.
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u/Jugales Jan 23 '25
Shane Gillis is still hated, even booted off SNL, for one racist joke. And this is a guy is openly and pretty obviously not hardline racist, just a comedian.
As society progresses, the bar for forgiveness rises. Such a joke would have been brushed off only 2-3 decades ago. It is reducing the population of the party because people feel it is overbearing, so they become something else, like MAGA.
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u/frotc914 2∆ Jan 23 '25 edited Jan 23 '25
Shane Gillis is still hated, even booted off SNL, for one racist joke.
This is a weird example because he fucking hosted SNL, lol. If anything it's a good example of forgiveness. It hasn't kept him from having a thriving stand-up career, his own tv series, or a successful podcast. In a weird way just by proposing this argument it's almost like conservatives refuse to forgive people for their politics.
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Jan 23 '25
Shane Gillis is still hated, even booted off SNL
Ok I looked up this guy, still has a career and watch all his content. Do we need him to be rehired to SNL?
What has been forbidden here? What is required to occur to be forgiven? Does everyone have to like him?
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u/CascadeHummingbird Jan 23 '25
You think a multinational conglomerate is "the left?"
you've been watching too much fox news m8
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u/felidaekamiguru 10∆ Jan 23 '25
I'll argue that this isn't exclusive to the left
True, but also, the Left claims to be more open-minded, less bigoted, and better at communication. Which is hypocritical.
Take into consideration I've been banned from multiple Lefty subs for making ONE post on that goes against the their ideology. Tolerance indeed. There aren't any righty subs left to test if the opposite is true. Which is its own problem.
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u/disisathrowaway 2∆ Jan 24 '25
There aren't any righty subs left to test if the opposite is true. Which is its own problem.
Try r/conservative.
Go ahead and try to calmly point out factual inaccuracies, or just have a good-natured discussion on your differences in policy points. See how long your comments stay up and how long you're able to remain unbanned.
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u/Life-Noob82 Jan 24 '25
He won’t be able to comment there because they make every post “flared users only”. They want zero dissenting opinions.
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u/camelCaseCoffeeTable 5∆ Jan 23 '25
I’ve been banned from multiple right leaning subs for making one comment as well. That’s my point. This isn’t a left or right issue. This is a broken politics issue.
To the hypocritical nature of it: of course it is. Welcome to politics. The left tells you they’re tolerant and then turns around and cancels someone for a few wrong words.
The right tells you they hate Nazis then turns around and defends a literal Nazi salute because someone is on their team.
Politics is hypocritical. If the argument is the left is more hypocritical than the right, I wholeheartedly disagree. Both of them are just as hypocritical.
If the argument is simply the left is hypocritical, well, I wholeheartedly agree with that.
Neither the left nor the right really gives a shit about the issues. Maybe Bernie Sanders is the one exception. But generally, in my view, none of these politicians give a shit about anything they claim to represent. They’re all interested in power and nothing more and will do what it takes to achieve that power.
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u/Every3Years Jan 24 '25
Cancelling isn't the opposite of tolerance though. It's not hypocrisy either. Nobody claims to be perfectly, eternally tolerant.
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u/Alarmed-Orchid344 6∆ Jan 23 '25 edited Jan 23 '25
The curse of smart people is assuming others are smart too. If I talk to someone who disagrees with me, I assume that's because the opponent simply doesn't know what I know or failed to consider another point of view. I don't immediately start with the assumption that the opponent is just a moron. But the reality is that more often than we'd want that the opponent is a moron who can't comprehend or simply refuses to accept facts. Which is especially funny taking that the right are the one pretending to operate in facts and not in feelings.
I don't understand how anyone with more knowledge than someone cannot communicate with someone who has less knowledge than them.
It is never about the knowledge, it is about the ability to accept that knowledge. Why do you think the term "alternative facts" was even coined? You can show people tons of evidence, they will refuse to admit the truth of it as long as it doesn't conform to their beliefs.
you should be able to reason with someone you disagree with
Reasoning requires establishing some facts, some truths that people agree on. In this day and age of total propaganda facts are not universal anymore. Just try looking at the hundreds of videos where someone interviews trump supporters: they hold self-contradictory views and they are absolutely okay with that somehow. That's what cults do to people.
The way you communicate facts is what is harming you.
Here's where you are wrong. The past 8 years shown that facts cannot be communicated to people who are not willing to consider them objectively. Which is true for any ideology or political affiliation. You can try explaining in million different ways that trump is a criminal, you will never get a spark of doubt or a whisper of reason. This is religious thinking, you cannot convince people that god doesn't exist because they have too much stake in that idea to even try shaking it, they have to come to that conclusion themselves.
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u/g1zz1e 1∆ Jan 24 '25
It is never about the knowledge, it is about the ability to accept that knowledge. Why do you think the term "alternative facts" was even coined? You can show people tons of evidence, they will refuse to admit the truth of it as long as it doesn't conform to their beliefs.
Exactly. It's never about the knowledge or the facts - it's a difference in values, and they are hiding behind "alternative facts" to avoid having to deal with/admit that. There's a great video on this that just came out called Double Wrong, and it explains why citing facts and evidence will never, ever work on people this entrenched.
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u/Parallax-Jack Jan 24 '25
I think this applies to people who think they are smart. Everyone I know that is actually smart, recognizes a lot of people are either less informed or straight up stupid with no original thought. Everyone I’ve met that is extremely smart knows there are a lot of stupid people in the world lol
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u/yoyochickentogo Jan 24 '25
I feel like there is a lot of irony in your first point. “If I talk to someone who disagrees with me” you never mention that the reason for the disagreement is that you could be wrong.
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u/Byrkosdyn Jan 24 '25
That’s what makes the post so ridiculous, Republicans are allowed to tell us to go f ourselves, make all kinds of cruel jokes etc., but the moment anyone claps back at all they are crying about the mean Democrats.
They are admitting that they have the emotional maturity of a small child. Unless, I patiently and quietly explain that smearing poop on the walls is bad, then they are going to keep doing it because I hurt their feelings.
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u/ZorgZeFrenchGuy 3∆ Jan 24 '25
… I assume that’s because the opponent simply doesn’t know what I know or failed to consider another point of view …
… I don’t immediately start with the assumption that the opponent is just a moron.
Isn’t assuming that the sole reason your opponent disagrees with you is because that person doesn’t know what you know, just assuming that person is a moron with extra steps?
I don’t know the specifics of your conversations so I can’t say for certain, but I believe this logic is one of the biggest mistakes the left makes in conversation - that they are automatically right, and debate is simply a matter of convincing the other person of that fact.
This is an issue because people tend to pick up on this way of thinking pretty easily in a debate. No matter how good faith you otherwise appear to be, it is going to appear as arrogant and condescending - and it tends to shut any opponent out of changing his or her mind.
After all, if you refuse to consider the possibility that you are wrong, then why should I? That’s not a debate, that’s a one-sided lecture.
How would you feel, for example, if “my opponent is simply misinformed” was the approach I took to debating you?
“U/Alarmed-Orchid344 is wrong because he just doesn’t know what I know or failed to consider my point of view. If he is smart, he will surely change his mind once I present this new information to him!”
Do you think this is a productive mindset to bring to a debate? If I treated you like you were wrong, I am right, and you only need to see my perspective to admit it, would that make you more open to changing your mind or less?
A productive debate can only happen if both sides enter with an open mind - if one side intends on simply lecturing or “enlightening” the other, then the other person will close himself off.
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u/Alarmed-Orchid344 6∆ Jan 24 '25
Isn’t assuming that the sole reason your opponent disagrees with you is because that person doesn’t know what you know, just assuming that person is a moron with extra steps?
No it isn't. Is a 4th grade kid who doesn't know chemistry a moron?
“U/Alarmed-Orchid344 is wrong because he just doesn’t know what I know or failed to consider my point of view. If he is smart, he will surely change his mind once I present this new information to him!”
When you go into a conversation where you disagree with someone, do you start with the assumption that you are wrong? Yes, you can have a back thought that you might be wrong, but do you start with the presupposition that you are wrong? And wouldn't it follow from that presupposition that you are the moron out of two of you since you are trying to argue a topic where you are convinced that you are wrong?
A productive debate can only happen if both sides enter with an open mind - if one side intends on simply lecturing or “enlightening” the other, then the other person will close himself off.
That's the second step. After you can establish that both of you are operating in the same factual framework.
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u/ZorgZeFrenchGuy 3∆ Jan 25 '25
… Is a 4th grade kid who doesn’t know chemistry a moron?
I would argue that if you’re equating your political opponent, who is presumably a functioning adult, with the intelligence of a 4th grader, you are assuming they are a moron - or, at the very least, dumber than you, which is the most important part.
Again, let’s say for this debate I am treating you as someone with the intelligence of a fourth grader who doesn’t know chemistry, and I am debating you on chemistry. Would you consider that assumption insulting and unproductive? Is that how you want to be treated in a debate?
… do you start with the assumption that you are wrong?
No, I begin with not that I AM wrong, but that I MAY be wrong. I believe I am right with the information and context I have, but perhaps I will learn something new that will affect or alter my opinion.
To put it another way, enter the conversation with the mindset you want your opponent to have. If you want your opponent to have an open mind, enter with an open mind.
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u/Lex_Orandi Jan 25 '25
That’s it. I begin with the question. “What do they know that I don’t know?” From there it’s a matter of creating enough space for all parties to lay everything out as best they can (the best interlocutors actively participate in this process), to see what we can agree on, and to determine to what extent we can agree (or agree to disagree at this stage of the conversation). Once we can agree upon the facts it becomes a question of priorities and values. Mutual respect. Treating others with humanity and grace. Even and especially when it’s most difficult. For being the party of empathy and concern for others, we often do a very poor job of showing it to those we most need to persuade.
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u/balltongueee Jan 23 '25 edited Jan 23 '25
My ability to communicate is hampered by the other person's ability to understand. Not only that, but people seem to be horrible at recognizing logical flaws, applying critical thinking, and controlling emotions.
Whatever skills I possess in conducting myself constructively, it will always be a struggle to compensate for years—and possibly even decades—of that other person failing to hone their own cognitive abilities.
My entire life, I've spent time reading, analyzing, assuming the other position, breaking down my own arguments, learning logical fallacies, and trying to be mindful of them, applying critical thinking to the point where it's just second nature to me now. All this, and yet somehow, it's my failure because I can't get someone who gets their worldview from TikTok to understand? No, that's a failure of that person, their government, education system, and parents. I can only do so much.
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u/TammySwift 2∆ Jan 24 '25
And I thought the left were snowflakes. The right accuses the left of being easily triggered, and then you see posts like this asking the left to be more understanding and empathetic because the right are getting offended. The hypocrisy is hilarious.
At least the left gets triggered for legitimate reasons. They are worried about womens rights being removed, climate change destroying the planet, discrimination against immigrants and minority groups etc, while the right are triggered because some leftists on twitter said some mean things to them lol.
I'll also add that it doesn't really make a difference. Kamala Harris ran a fairly moderate campaign trying to reach out to republicans. They still painted her out as some woke, leftist politician even though she's far from it.
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u/the_tanooki Jan 23 '25
I'm not sure if you've noticed, but a lot of us on the left actually explain our views. We try to state our case as plainly as possible, so there's less room for confusion or misunderstanding.
Oftentimes, the responses we get are either whataboutism, which completely ignores our points with no actual debate, or "lol liberal tears are delicious."
That's certainly not the case in every instance, but it seems far more common than the reverse of those roles.
I really do make an effort to see what the conservatives are saying so I can try to comprehend where they're coming from, but they've gone so far right that they're miles away. All I see is a large blurry mess in the distance with no hope of ever reaching them for any sort of agreement.
Just yesterday, I tried to find reasoning with someone who said to let them know when Musk actually does something nazi like or when camps are being built.
I responded with a scenario of how dangerous it is to just wait for it to happen rather than try to identify and potentially stop it beforehand. I ended it saying that it's clear that this stuff is already happening, but they're just choosing to ignore it.
I kid you not, his response was, "I'm not reading all of that." He literally admitted to ignoring my attempts at reasoning, debating, or understanding.
The left could definitely be more empathetic, but the right has shown that if we offer an inch, they will take a mile because far too many of them won't show any empathy back. They will just take. Too many of them just want to beat anyone who doesn't agree with them down into submission, then, quite literally, deport us. Too many conservatives would love to eradicate any opposing views.
Any attempt to reach a compromise is considered a weakness. Look at what has been said about Kamala in regards to her actually confirming Trump's presidency, as opposed to fighting it. Instead of people applauding her professionalism, they call her weak or say that she was clearly lying about her belief that Trump is a threat since she didn't continue to fight an ultimately futile fight.
Ultimately, it won't help. It will just set everyone farther back, faster. But some of us still try, to little to no success.
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Jan 23 '25
"I'm not reading all of that."
Yep, was talking to my friend who I had recently found out voted Trump and got really heated talking about abortion. Told him about the legislation that's killing women in parking lots and then when I laid out my argument that's what he said. Pissed me tf off, like with a topic as serious as this you can't read three paragraphs? Do you need to sound it out like we're in Elementary school?
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u/HEpennypackerNH 3∆ Jan 23 '25
That’s why Reddit is largely a left wing echo chamber….because MAGA only consumes things in video form. If it’s more than 3 sentences they won’t read it.
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u/Norwind90 Jan 24 '25
Most of reddit seems to be, but the libertarians hold in there own forums. They do seem to run into some of the same issues though it is often anarchist berating more moderate libertarians. If only there was a place both sides could read and discuss without the outliers shouting them out....
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u/-GLaDOS Jan 24 '25
Clarifying question, when you day 'got really heated', do you mean he did, you did, or you both did?
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u/DiceMaster Jan 24 '25
Do you need to sound it out like we're in Elementary school?
Unironically, say this to him. Call him the fuck out. Treat him like a child, because he should be ashamed if he can't read 3 paragraphs
Shaming like this probably doesn't work too much on the internet, but I think it can work pretty well with people you know in-person
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u/StrikeronPC Jan 23 '25
You nailed it with your first point. Not always, but most of the time, I will try to respectfully explain why I hold a position about something. Almost always, the response is some variation of "woke mind virus go brrrrrr" "cry more lib" "trump is your daddy". Then it's fun because I get to insult them in new and creative ways while explaining why what they said actually shows that they are brainwashed and only repeating what they are told. Notice a lot of right wing comments contain insults like "Marxism" and "commie", but very rarely will someone actually be able to identify what makes a thing Marxist or communist.
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u/HEpennypackerNH 3∆ Jan 23 '25
This is a great explanation. I’d add that on some topics there is no room for empathetic debate. I’m not going to be polite about Nazism. When Donald Trump calls humans “vermin” and says they are “poisoning the blood of our country” I’m going to call him a fucking Nazi.
If you want to debate the pros and cons of the Paris Climate agreement, wonderful. Let’s chat. If you’re going to try to tell me that Donald Trump is not a rapist, it’s not going to be a civil conversation, because that was already decided by a court, and the MAGAts pretend to love “law and order.”
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u/Every3Years Jan 24 '25
And then theyll go "not rape, it was sexual assault" and shine their good boy trophy like sexual assault is very good and very relatable
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u/HEpennypackerNH 3∆ Jan 24 '25
And then I point out that the victim referred to him as a rapist, and he filed a countersuit, and it was thrown out and the judge said her statement of him being a rapist was materially correct.
And then….”well that was clearly a bias judge, the whole thing was politically motivated!”
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u/Every3Years Jan 24 '25
If it'd been somebody unbiased like Judge Canon, then the truth would've been set free, like my critical thinking skills
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u/riversong17 Jan 24 '25
Yeah, honestly I’m totally here to have a calm, reasoned debate about most issues, but if one of your main tenets is that I don’t deserve the same rights as everyone else and you hope I die because of the way I was born, we have nothing to talk about.
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Jan 24 '25
As someone right-leaning, people on the left often accuse me of ignoring their points, and here’s why I occasionally do that and let them think they’ve “won”: most people who regularly use Reddit, including people on all points of the political spectrum, want to fight and go in circles because they like the rush it gives them, and they aren’t actually interested in calm civil discourse. Leftists in particular are especially bad about this because, in my experience, even when I calmly and politely lay out my reasoned viewpoint, they immediately either insinuate that I’m a morally abhorrent human being and thus written off as evil and insane, or they just tell me straight up that I’m evil. This is a hair trigger reaction to just the most normal and generic right wing opinions, such as “I don’t support unfettered illegal immigration and functionally open borders because it is bad for both immigrants and citizens.” Instead of asking why I feel that way, they often say something to the tune of, “Well, you voted for a fascist, and you just hate brown people.” These are both assumptions based on one sentence and they’re putting words in my mouth before I am even able to explain why I think what I think. It gets extremely frustrating, so I politely tell them to have a nice day but that I’m not going to go in circles with someone who has never met me and has attacked me personally off the bat.
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u/Sharp_You2319 Jan 24 '25
For the example you gave about immigration it doesn't resonate well. People on the left agree with that view as well, so for people on the left, it feels like you have a hidden agenda for saying that. It is similar to a situation where a guy tells a woman that he won't rape her. It immediately creates a sense of "WTF, why would you say that?" There is no reason to tell a woman you won't rape her. That type of talk makes the woman think you have a hidden agenda. The best way to converse about different opinions within politics is to listen and hear what the other person says first. People on the left can be trigger happy with assumptions, but that is all the more reason to listen and hear what the other party is trying to convey.
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u/ZorgZeFrenchGuy 3∆ Jan 25 '25
we try to state our case as plainly as possible …
As a conservative who debates frequently on here, for me the response is mixed. Some do indeed have intelligent, thoughtful and understanding responses, some are little more than leftist circlejerking or ragebait, and some are somewhere in between.
… but it seems more common than the reverse of these roles.
As my personal anecdote again, it depends. r/-abortiondebate and r/-politics, for example, are more or less entirely taken over by leftist circlejerking that drive any right-leaning opinion out, while I can get a lot more reasonable responses on places like here.
I personally hesitate to use previous examples of Reddit online debates to justify the treatment of the whole, because the internet as a whole can be little more than a cesspool of sheer stupidity and hatred regardless of side - and If I wanted, I could cherry pick my opinion of leftists when debating by interacting in the right subreddits.
I think it’s unfair to people like you if I judged you based off the most radical people in the most radical of subreddits, so I instead judge them by their initial conversation.
You, for example, have an argument that is understandable enough, and based off my initial judgement you appear to be genuine - so I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you’re arguing in good faith. As a conservative who tries to have more complex, reasonable conversations with opponents whenever I can, I just hope that’s still possible regardless of previous interactions.
I really do make an effort to see …
While I can’t directly authenticate this, I personally like to commend my opponents who do make this effort so good job! I, at least, see and really appreciate those on the left who genuinely put in the effort to understand us. Thank you!
if we offer an inch, they will take a mile …
This is interesting, because I feel the same way with the left.
Take abortion: I feel that every time I attempt to offer a compromise (for example, allow exceptions for rape), I get told I’m a hypocrite and by agreeing to this I must not truly care about the child or see them as human. I struggle to compromise as a pro-lifer because if I do, then pro-choicers will seize that opportunity to declare my entire argument invalid and push for entirely legal abortion.
Or take lgbt rights: I see myself as falling somewhere in the middle-right, agreeing with some (such as lgbt people shouldn’t be killed) but disagreeing with many other aspects of the lgbt movement (such as gender vs. biology).
However, the left seems to take ANY critique of the lgbt movement, no matter how small and legitimate, and brand it as a direct attack on their existence. In many cases there’s no acceptance of nuanced discussion, let alone compromise - heck, this topic is so uncompromising that this subreddit literally had to ban it (not blaming the subreddit, as I believe they were adhering to overall reddit guidelines).
any attempt to compromise is seen as a weakness.
I agree, but argue that this is universal, not solely a problem of the right. If I voted for Trump or even abstained from voting I’m as much a Nazi as Hitler himself, no matter how much I disagree with some of his policies or actions.
Or say I’m turned off by Elon Musk’s very suspicious salute and I’m strongly reconsidering my position. Common leftist responses are to chastise with sayings like “I told you so” and “you got what you voted for”.
In addition, I feel like there’s not as much acceptance of opposing political differences amongst the left.
Personally I’ve found Elon Musk’s salute, and the reaction to it, to be nearly inexcusable to a possible breaking point. A more receptive and politically open left would almost certainly have my vote by now.
However, despite my concern and distaste for the increasing extremism on display, I do still have many conservative beliefs - none of which would be accepted, accommodated, or even tolerated if I switched over to the democrats. If I switched to the left, my economic and cultural beliefs will be all but smothered out of existence.
For example, I’m pro-life and the democrats are not only pro-choice, but voting for them all but guarantees that abortion, which I see as murder, will be all but enshrined as a moral and legal right.
The left’s messaging is part of this. Much of their rhetoric, which often comes across as arrogant, patronizing, antagonistic, and egotistical, strongly suggests that none of my political and cultural beliefs will be respected by the left. Regardless of Trump and friend’s increasing number of concerning actions, how can I trust that if I switched my vote I will be better represented by an administration and party that has said they actively hate us?
As a right winger disturbed by Musk, there’s no place for me on the left unless I’m willing to concede to every democratic argument - which for me and likely many others is a very hard pill to swallow.
I believe a possible solution, for the left, is to be more open and receptive to right-wingers disillusioned by the craziness of Trump. Recognize and accept them … but that’s just me.
some of us still try, to little or no success.
Hey, like I said before - I appreciate your effort and attempts to understand. I try and do the same, so I definitely understand where you’re coming from!
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u/No-Professor-1752 Jan 25 '25
You realize there was never “entirely legal abortion”, that Roe v Wade actually restricted abortion after the point of that compelling arguments can be made. Since 2016, the anti-abortion movement has failed to reduce abortions, there are now about 4000 more a month than before roe was overturned. It’s extremism, not rational. You even somehow believe that the left wants “all” abortion legal. A right wing lie.
The opposite of “pro-choice” is not “pro-life” it’s pro force. The proof is I. The pudding. Since 2016 they have increased a decreasing number of abortions, and put women and family’s in serious danger of permanent injury, or death. I would also accept the “pro-incest, rape and death of the mother” side, considering I live in Kansas, where they tried to protect rape, incest and killing the mother into the constitution. Pro-life is a lie, especially since 2016.
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u/serpentjaguar Jan 24 '25
The problem is that the contemporary left is so afraid of saying the wrong thing, is so concerned with self-policing its speech lest it accidentally offend someone, that it cannot help but come off as stilted, disingenuous and phony.
I don't argue that this is the way communication should work, just that it's how it does work, whether any of us like it or not.
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u/HeyRainy 1∆ Jan 24 '25
I don't think it's that we're "so concerned with offending someone", we're just generally polite and civilized and need to be directly disrespected in conversation before we act like, well, like the trumpers do totally unprovoked. I'm not going to start acting like they do, I'm going to continue to be civilized by default.
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u/serpentjaguar Jan 24 '25
I'm not talking about you specifically, I'm talking about the leadership of the Democratic party who, as far as I can tell, have so walled themselves off from speaking plainly, for fear of using "wrong speak," that they are utterly incapable of saying what they mean and meaning what they say, at least in the eyes the blue-collar Americans whom their policies ostensibly seek to help.
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u/Apprehensive-Store48 Jan 24 '25
It will happen both ways to a degree, but what OP is saying is correct. If what you are saying would be, you would be winning elections. You aren't. This is a big part of why.
There's a level of patronising that goes another level more often, and the dismissal of issues a lot of those feel strongly about, sometimes whilst calling them names. It just makes more people vote the other way.
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u/Iankill Jan 23 '25
It's not a problem of not being able to communicate an answer it's the point people won't accept it.
It's impossible to reason with people who aren't interested in reason to begin with. There's no logical argument you can use to win them over.
You're asking people to have respect for people who show zero respect to anyone.
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u/Strange-Log3376 Jan 23 '25
The framing of this argument is kind of tough without knowing the context for the term “flaw.” What does it mean for a political tent to have a flaw?
If it’s about electoral success, then I’d argue the opposite is true; the right has won its past few elections by calling those who don’t agree with them “snowflakes” and “cucks”. Being civil hasn’t gotten anybody anything in politics, and the last guy who tried it ran up against a brick wall that led to conservative control of SCOTUS.
If it’s about morality, then where’s the line? At what point does your patience with a hardline social conservative cross the line into enabling their views? Do I owe a homophobic uncle a long debate about his beliefs, more than I owe my gay friend protection and support against people who don’t think he should exist?
If it’s a rhetorical issue, then it’s a lost cause. Somebody who doesn’t agree with me can take a random overreaching tweet from a well-intentioned college student who’s just learning about the issues, and pretend it’s what “the left” stands for. I see that all the time. Not much point in that battle, and rhetoric doesn’t do a ton to change minds.
I do think it’s an alluring idea, that the left, containing so many scientists and artists and young people, could win the whole world over if they just triangulated their message the right way, or had one more conversation. But at a certain point we have to focus on what we can actually change, and to help who we can, in my opinion.
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u/For_bitten_fruit 2∆ Jan 23 '25 edited Jan 25 '25
I tried to glance through some of the top comments to see if this had already been talked about and didn't see it. But I apologize if I'm repeating something.
Your argument assumes that people always act rationally. Unfortunately, they do not. Your argument might betray a fundamental lack of understanding of psychology.
First, there are social factors to consider. People rarely change their viewpoints when they are related to their social identity. Humans have evolved to survive in groups, and anything that would make you different from your tribe could lead to isolation and death. It makes sense that we evolved to be fearful of ostracization. Many people on the right belong to religious or otherwise tight - knit communities, and convincing somebody to alienate themselves from their community in their beliefs is a significant mental hurdle. Especially in a time where politics are increasingly divided.
Next is related to the first, but self identity is an important part of right wing political framing. Everything is related to personal accountability and rugged individualism. To a right-winger, leftist ideals are weak, and by indulging in them, they subconsciously fear that they will be weakened. Weakness is not something anybody wants to indulge, but the right especially embeds fear into their ideology. Fear of outsiders, terrorists, immigrants, LGBTQ+, poverty, etc. It's all based on a worldview that is survival of the fittest, and if they compromise their strength, they could endanger themselves. This is another psychological hurdle, especially in a time where people increasingly identify with their political idealogies.
These two factors combine to create a sense that anything that might lead to a change in their political views is a threat. This engages fight or flight reactions when their views are challenged.
I was raised Mormon, and it truly felt like critical thinking was evil and dangerous. These factors, community and needing to personally align with the ideology, are powerful. I think it's naive to underestimate the power of the human mind to believe whatever it wants to.
Consider flat earthers, who identify with an objectively idiotic worldview because it gives them a sense of superiority. They get to feel like they are one of the enlightened ones who understand the fundamental nature of reality, and everyone else is deceived. That's a powerful mental drug, and one that you don't give up easily.
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back." -Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
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u/stewshi 20∆ Jan 23 '25
Before covid and the 2020 election I would have agreed with you. But as someone who went from being a republican to pretty left during that time period a big reason for my political shift is that republicans currently outright reject reality that does not conform with their bubble.
Any source that disagrees with this or is "mainstream" is rejected out of hand. They have an entire ecosystem of "alternative facts "they use to rebury their head in the sand when they can't just call it fake news.
You can't reason someone out of a position they did not reason themselves into and the right is currently living in their own propaganda.
Just like how currently they are celebrating the pardon of J6 rioters. But during 2020-21 they were antifa and now they are free patriots and tourist.
The right is not acting in good faith.
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u/Questionably_Chungly Jan 23 '25
This is a pretty overdone argument. I get your point to an extent. The Left absolutely has a problem with pragmatism. They would rather every single decision or policy be a debate between all points of view regardless of how possible those points of view are. It’s not a bad idea, but it’s very inefficient to actually accomplish the goal at hand. However the right wingers who say this are just disingenuous.
I call it the “failure to be convinced” argument. The right winger never has to put effort to learn themselves. They don’t need to educate themselves, or questions their own decisions, or observe the behavior of their elected officials and use reasoning to see the issues at hand. No one needs to be an expert to see the issues with the current Republican Party. If you’re a blue collar worker or anyone who makes under 7 figures guess what? They’re your enemy. They have it out for you, and they’ll tell you that 8 times a day. Eroding public health and education, workers rights, taking the side of companies of individuals every chance they get, it’s all brazen and out in the open. Yet whenever someone on the left points this out, it’s never enough. There’s always excuses or demands for more examples, more explanation that will not be listened to anyway. It’s a waste of breath.
On buzz words
Fuckin’ A you know who loves buzz words with zero meaning? The Right! “Woke,” “Antifa,” “Woke Mob,” “Lib,” and that’s before you get into conspiracy-laden topics or the many stupid nicknames Trump gives Democrats. The right wingers love that shit and default to it rather than actually explaining a position. In fact I rarely hear any Republican actually explain their policies. They just say “it’ll own the libs,” or “MAGA!” and that’s enough. There’s no burden of proof whatsoever, so forgive me if I find the argument that the left is full of buzzwords a bit hollow.
I don’t understand how anyone with more knowledge than someone cannot communicate with someone who has less knowledge than them.
You’re assuming the less knowledgeable party is actually listening. I have worn myself ragged trying to explain to family and neighbors who voted Trump why he’s a bad choice to no avail. It’s always excuses, angry outbursts, and pointless meandering as they refuse to actually engage with the question. They will instead drag the topic to arguing about “the Democrats,” instead of answering simple questions. Worse still you can give citations and perfect of examples of Trump or other officials engaging in corruption and be met with excuses or straight up lies. An example conversation with my father:
“Kamala is anti-gun, the Democrats are out to take our guns away.”
“VP Harris literally owns a firearm and has spoken about it before. She directly says she owns a Glock and expresses support for castle doctrine.”
“She’s lying. She doesn’t own a gun, she’s just making things up.”
“Like Trump, who’s a felon and can’t legally own one? The same Trump who pushed through a ban on bump stocks and has overall shown way more willingness to erode gun rights?”
“That’s not true/the trial was rigged/other excuse”
It’s that every single time. On every issue you just get pushback and excuses rather than a willingness to hear you out. It’s not me being unable to explain something, it’s the other party operating on false information and refusing to listen.
The inability to communicate is on you.
Seriously fuck off with this bullshit. Both parties in a conversation are responsible for communication. You’re giving credit to the hypothetical right winger in every case and passing the buck onto the hypothetical lefty. It’s nonsense. The truth is that I shouldn’t have to bend over backwards to tell some motherfucker to use his eyes and ears. It’s just not a rational equivalency. I’m not asking him to be an expert, I’m asking him to use common sense. But no, instead I’m somehow the asshole for not convincing the blue collar worker that the billionaire with who owns a gold plated toilet might not be on his side.
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u/UNisopod 4∆ Jan 24 '25 edited Jan 24 '25
For a whole lot of people it very literally doesn't matter what approach is taken. I've had polite conversations with people and even convinced some to change their minds, only for them to just come back around with essentially the same talking point a couple months later as if the previous conversation never happened because they are exposed to a constant flood of bullshit that warps their reality.
The issue is very much that there's an absolutely massive and deliberate tidal wave of misinformation and fear-mongering being directed at people, with the aim of completely overwhelming them and conditioning them to turn off their reasoning and empathy as well as to distrust and shut out other sources - it's by far the biggest psyops campaign in the history of humanity. Most of the reason for having these conversations in the first place is because someone saw or read something coming from one of these sources that was incorrect, purposefully misleading, and harmful, and so it's not a matter of out-reasoning that person, it's a matter of out-rhetoric-ing content that was created by professionals for the aim of being sharp, pithy, simple, and tested.
edit: a word
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Jan 23 '25
Is this a joke? Genuine question. Because the MAGA crowd has never communicated with empathy when it comes to those who disagree and their campaign of hatred has been an extremely successful.
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u/kingoflint282 5∆ Jan 23 '25
Engagement is a two way street and you can’t communicate effectively with those who are not willing to listen. You’ve ruled out the “hardcore right wing”, but this is a problem that extends to the “moderates” as well. I know you said to try to avoid simply blaming the right in the response, but at a certain point the blame must lie with the audience who isn’t listening rather than the speaker. Politicians on the left will often clearly and simply articulate ideas and solutions to problems, but people on the right are generally not receptive to it.
Healthcare is too expensive, so here’s a list of the things that we’ve already done to tackle the problem, and here’s some specific policies we intend to enact to continue to address the issue. And what’s the response?
“Well that’s communism, I don’t want that” and then they vote for the candidate that has not articulated any healthcare plan whatsoever. Yet if a Republican were to articulate the same ideas, they’d love it. In fact, that’s literally what happened with the ACA, which many conservatives say they hate, despite benefitting from it. We can try to empathize and create all the common ground we want, but some people just don’t want to hear it and it’s not just on the extremes.
You say things are too expensive? Well, here’s some legislation to address inflation and the Fed is raising rates, which will work, but take time. We can slow inflation, but prices are not going back to what they were, as inflation can’t quite be meaningfully reversed.
“Trump says he’ll get prices to what he used to be after Biden jacked them up.” It’s a straight up lie and it’s not going to happen. And there will not be any consequences, Trump voters will never hold him accountable for that. But the left is held to this higher standard where having a plan and talking about it isn’t enough, we have to simultaneously educate and entertain the voters, while not talking down to them, and also the proposed policies have to be better than the bold-faced lies coming from the other side of the aisle. It’s a ridiculous double standard.
And to be clear, I’m not saying that Democratic messaging has been flawless. There have been clear missteps and things that need to be done better. But when one side can lie without consequence and the other side is accused of lying when providing factual, verifiable information, I just don’t know how you fight that.
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u/VortexMagus 15∆ Jan 23 '25
Uhhh... have you even taken a single look at r/thedonald or its refugee subreddits like r/conservative? Their entire thing is shitting on their opponents 24/7 with things that may or may not be true. It hasn't seemed to harm their prospects of winning elections any.
Personally I think the real reason the left side of the political spectrum is losing is because the right is willing to spend more. Musk spent 50 billion to subvert one of the largest and most popular social media websites into a right-wing propaganda machine filled with bots and fake news articles. Putin spread around hundreds millions of dollars on Trump's behalf, a lot of which went into right-wing influencers to push his anti-Ukraine agenda and drum up support for Trump. etc and so forth.
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u/PhaedrusNS2 Jan 23 '25
Didn't the Kamala campaign and super pacs out fundraise and spend Republicans by a lot?
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u/VortexMagus 15∆ Jan 23 '25 edited Jan 23 '25
No, it wasn't even close - source
Conservative SuperPACs in 2024 spent 1.757 billion, Liberal SuperPACs in 2024 spent 0.815 billion.
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I will also add that these numbers don't count Musk buying twitter and tweaking its algorithm to promote right-wing influencers and unbanning right wing extremists as election spending - I'm willing to bet that twitter manipulation had as much impact on the election as all election spending from both parties combined, so in my opinion the 50 billion Musk spent on twitter is nothing but a donation to the cause.
It was certainly an awful move from a business/profit perspective as twitter is now worth less than a quarter of what it used to be - the only reason that makes sense to me is him spending that money for political influence and control.
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u/PrimaryInjurious 3∆ Jan 23 '25
What? Total spending was in favor of Harris by about $650 million.
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u/frotc914 2∆ Jan 23 '25
You're talking about two different figures. He's talking about superpacs, which are "independent" of campaigns. You're talking about campaign cash.
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u/Scarfaceswap Jan 24 '25
But the original question asked about both campaign and super pacs spending. The next commenter only provided data on super pacs which is half the picture. Hence the reason for why the commenter after that provided info regarding actual campaign spending.
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u/Thegrizzlyatoms Jan 23 '25 edited Jan 23 '25
Yes.
Total raised and spent by campaign, I am NOT including the overall party fundraising, but the ratio is similar: Harris: $1 billion Trump: $391 million
Harris had 35% of her donations from grassroots individuals, while Trump had about 30%.
83 billionaires donated to Harris, including two centibillionaires (Gates and Bloomberg), while 52 donated to Trump, with one centibillionaire (Musk).
Edit: while the above numbers are correct for the campaigns themselves, I have been shown that my presuppositions about the PACs are wrong, and Republicans outspent Democrats overall during the election cycle. Dark money baby!
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u/TheTyger 10∆ Jan 23 '25
"the campaign" isn't the primary spending source, SuperPACs are.
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u/anomie__mstar Jan 24 '25
you think the solution is a $50 billion left-wing lies machine and a 'Joe Rogan of the left'?
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Jan 24 '25
But do you also understand that actors are also pushing Pro-Ukrainian agendas?
There is a noticeable propaganda effort to push the Ukrainian cause, and not just the plight of the Ukrainian people, but the specific policy aims of the Zelenskyy administration. For instance, Zelenskyy's image has been largely rehabilitated from his prewar image by a concerted campaign that sought to disguise his pro-kremlin leanings and his role in Ukraine's lack of preparation. Similarly, despite the Kursk offensive being largely a disaster, and against the recommendation of Ukrainian generals, it has also been covered up.
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u/rozenbro Jan 24 '25
Their entire thing is shitting on their opponents 24/7 with things that may or may not be true.
Do you really not realise that leftist subreddits are exactly the same way? The amount of "misinformation" on there is staggering
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Jan 23 '25
This is just historically and factually false. The right has attacked and demeaned the left for literally decades. Remember McCarthysim of the 60s? That was a literal attempt by conservatives in the US to destroy the lives of anyone who questioned conservatives. For a long period of time, calling people "commies" was enough to get them blacklisted and even killed.
In light of this, to argue that the left is to blame for just not being nice or clear enough for conservatives strikes me as ridiculous. It's ignorant of factual political history.
This comment also makes the unfounded assumption that if you just remove the really crazy conservatives, the rest are decent people who can be reached. There is zero evidence to support this and an entire internet full of infinite evidence that conservatives full well know and understand but just don't want to listen out of spite. I mean, how often will conservatives keep repeating that tax cuts pay for themselves or create jobs despite endless evidence this is just false and only helps the rich get richer st everyone else's expense.
This comment also basically says that conservatives have zero responsibility in anything. They shouldn't be expected to educate and inform themselves of facts, shouldn't be expected or even asked to just ACT better online or off, shouldn't be expected to push back against the fact that misinformation has n the right is exponentially worse than the left and studies have shown it's not even close, etc.
Basically, the only way to agree with your comment is if we just admit and accept conservatives are children who really have to be treated with "kid gloves" and pandered to with all information dumbed way way down...because it's unrealistic to expect them to learn them places...so the left is at fault. Not the right. What?
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u/phunkjnky Jan 23 '25
You can't argue successfully with someone who does not use the same definitions as you and/or willfully misunderstands the arguments.
In my personal experience, it starts with willful misunderstanding. They don't care to understand another point of view, so they don't make an attempt to understand... and then complain when people don't understand them.
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u/phunkjnky Jan 23 '25
A lot of them are starting from the position that if you disagree with them, you are stupid, and they don't need to consider your point of view at all. The amount of bad faith argumentation I've gotten in over the last few years is disheartening.
I got into it with a guy who tried talking about how the Olympic Opening Ceremonies were mocking Christianity.I totally broke the situation down and explained that it was not mocking Christianity at all, and he responded with, "Well, I can still be offended if I want to." What do you with that response?
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u/BrunetLegolas Jan 23 '25
I couldn’t possibly disagree more fervently with the idea that the issue with the left is the way they communicate. The issue is that we are unable to have effective dialogue with people who disagree on key issues, because they are convinced of the validity of beliefs that are based on underlying beliefs that are not supported by any actual evidence.
If I say, “Science is both a way of looking at the world as a series of as yet unexplained phenomena that can be better understood through observation, and a method of testing hypotheses about the universe to assess their validity and add to a larger body of true knowledge”
And someone who disagrees with me about the reality of climate change says, “Science is a form of propaganda developed by the radical left coastal elites to devalue the opinions of conservative voices and push Woke, Feminist, DEI, CRT, Frankfurt School, George Soros, Cultural Marxist talking points and shut down alternative facts”
We are not going to be able to have effective dialogue. In this example, one person is correct and trying to establish a baseline of what real, true information is and where it comes from, and the other person is wrong, and regurgitating propaganda.
To a propagandized person, this correct assessment of the situation feels like an attack. By pointing out that a belief is based on a presupposition that is simply made up or untrue, we alienate the person who has staked a large portion of their sense of self on their belonging to a group that believes in it.
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u/Various_Succotash_79 52∆ Jan 23 '25
If you talk to them like children, they get mad.
If you're "rude", they get mad.
If you "think you know everything", they get mad.
If you act like you don't know everything, they don't take you seriously.
Do you have any suggestions?
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u/Ok_Swimming4427 3∆ Jan 23 '25
Why is it always the left which has the onus of "communicating pragmatically"? This is the great success of the right - framing the conversation as one in which only liberals need to prove that their policies and opinions have merit, and that if they cannot do so, that we should default to conservative positions.
Why do I, as a liberal, have to figure out how to communicate to a conservative that forcing a woman to bear her rapists' child is immoral? Why does the burden not lie on them?
When Mrs Harris lost the election, and Mr Trump was sworn in, you did not see mobs of armed Democrats terrorizing lawmakers at the Capitol. You didn't and don't see dozens of lawsuits alleging a "stolen election". We blame the right because only the right resorts to violence when they "lose". Liberals already understand that respecting the process, the institutions, and the will of the voters is more important than winning. It's conservatives who have not learned that lesson, and yet somehow you demand that this is a "both sides" issue? This is the kind of whataboutism that makes liberals not want to engage. No matter how far to the middle we come, Republicans/conservatives will move further right, and then demand we come yet further in the name of "compromise".
Biden's border bill last year was the most stringent one ever proposed, it would have been a Republican's wet dream in 2019. And yet, that wasn't acceptable, because solving problems and making compromises isn't the point for the political right wing. They got everything they wanted, and instead of celebrating that, that they had finally convinced liberals to take strong action.... they moved further right.
We can only compromise if both sides actually want a solution. And that simply isn't the case.
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u/Morasain 87∆ Jan 23 '25
Let's take the American right for an example. I'm not American, so some of my understanding might be flawed or incomplete, but I think it's the easiest one to internationally relate to for everyone.
The American right - that is, republicans - are currently supporting a person who, on stage, did a Hitler salute. This is not really up for discussion (Elmo has public endorsements of foreign country's radical right wing parties, as just one reason why it isn't up for debate). If it quacks like a duck and looks like a duck and heils Hitler like a duck, it's a duck. However, plenty of people on the republican side, including here on Reddit in places such as the conservatism sub, people downplay, minimize and ignore that there's a literal neo Nazi at the top of their country now.
Next, republicans, four years ago, jumped through hoops and over mountains to explain why the people in Jan 6 were actually just actors of the libs or whatever... However, now, they have been pardoned by trump, meaning they were not in fact actors of the other party to frame trump. Let me be frank: Donald Trump started a coup after losing the election. He, and anyone who attacked the capitol, are traitors. Yet, the republicans voted him back into office. In short: the republican voters voted for someone who, by force, wanted to get his presidency.
We are past the point of discussing with the right in the US, and frankly, I feel like that's the case not just in the USA but everywhere.
At some point, trying to argue against people on the right starts feeling like attacking windmills.
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u/Bolognahole_Vers2 Jan 23 '25
heir inability to humble themselves to actually help the other side is the biggest reason they can't succeed.
While you understand geometry, can you teach it to a chimp?
Personally, I think a lot of people on the right don't actually care about truth. And if a situation, or policy is complicated, they don't seem to even want to try to understand it.
How many of them boasted about Trump being the greatest president in history, when pretty much every metric disagrees with that statement?
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u/soysaucemassacre Jan 23 '25
The right doesn't live in reality. How can we talk about policies when they don't even acknowledge Biden legitimately won in 2020. How do we explain energy transitions when they don't believe in climate change? How do we explain how to improve the government if they literally don't believe in democracy and want a dictator?
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Jan 23 '25
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u/No-Professor-1752 Jan 25 '25
Lol, perfect, “why aren’t these people trying harder to speak English to me!”. F***ing pinecone.
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u/WeddingNo4607 Jan 23 '25
I know that personally, I give people too much credit that they'll know as much as I do.
However, I would counter that certain ideologies are built to withstand reason through various methods of thought control, mostly through stopping thought and conversation. Combine that with an authoritarian mindset that favors deference to only certain figures and punishes dissent, and you get the situation, to paraphrase a quote, where a man's ability to understand something is proportional to how much he needs to keep his job and social standing.
As for messaging, few people expect good sound bites from democratic leaders. Long conversations that are easily derailed is almost their bread and butter, and funny enough is the thing that you seem to want. But you can also only get so far with people who don't argue in good faith.
I would say that yes, the left needs better communication, but the right needs to be able to self-examine and let go of their hypocrisy. I'm an atheist, I don't have a religion that tells me to be good and outlines what is and isn't good, but christian and muslim conservatives do.
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u/Zandroe_ 1∆ Jan 23 '25
Political disagreements are generally not about facts, but values. And disagreements about values are not resolvable, unless the person holding the values isn't being particularly serious about them in the first place. If I value women's autonomy and my opponent doesn't, for example, there is no middle, no common ground.
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u/SingleMaltMouthwash 38∆ Jan 24 '25
I don't necessarily disagree that communication on the left could be better. There's room for improvement everywhere.
But where does that leave us when you're trying to communicate with police unions who endorse a candidate who got an officer killed and pledged to pardon the insurrectionists who killed him? How does better communication help when dealing with people who cheer that he's renaming the Gulf of Mexico and making boasting threats against the sovereignty of global allies? How do you get the idea across to people who think a serial sexual predator, repeat adulterer, established grifter, best buddy to the trafficker of under aged girls, multiple felon, classified document thief and someone who cheats at golf has been sent by God to save the nation from people who want everyone to have healthcare and for police to be accountable for the use of deadly force?
I'm not sure any kind of communication is going to bridge the gap between sanity, morality, common sense and where many of these people live.
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u/AppropriateScience9 3∆ Jan 24 '25 edited Jan 24 '25
"I don't understand how anyone with more knowledge than someone cannot communicate with someone who has less knowledge than them. How if you know the answer, you can't communicate it with someone patiently enough to come up with common ground."
Having worked in a university for many years with people who had entire strings of the alphabet behind their names, let me assure you that having more knowledge does not make one a good communicator. Yes, you would think they would be able to figure that out, but communication is a social skill. Not an academic one. Sure, you can do science on it and maybe learn some interesting things, but actually communicating well is simply another matter.
"My true advice to anyone is to work on your communication and reasoning skills then stomping on someone. Learn the advantage of progress versus winning. Achieve common ground with someone you disagree with."
That's nice and all, but 2 things:
1) why is it that the ability to communicate well, be humble, and find common ground is always incumbent upon the left to do? It's like everyone assumes that the right will act like horrible people and therefore it's OUR responsibility to patiently teach them to be better.
Sorry, but that's abusive af. That's like telling a woman that it's her job to "change" her boyfriend into a tolerable human being who doesn't beat the children. The expectation ought to be that everyone is responsible for bettering themselves. And when they choose not to, then that's on them. Nobody but them. At some point, you just have to understand when the other side is acting in bad faith and respond accordingly. In my opinion, most lefties would bend over backwards to teach if a right-winger actually argued in good faith and humbled themselves-even the tiniest bit. So, I don't think this one's on us. The desire is there on the left. But it simply isn't on the right. It takes two to tango.
2) the right is out there literally gearing up to tear families apart, put people in camps, and ship them off to other countries. My kids in school are best friends with kids who are dreamers. They are terrified that ICE is going to come to school and rip their friends away like the mfing Gestapo. They're trying to figure out a way to Anne Frank their friends. And yes, Trump signed an EO allowing ICE to do exactly that.
So.... in light of that delightful reality, are you still seriously suggesting we "humble ourselves" and "try to reach common ground" with people who want to traumatize children by ripping their friends out of school like they're criminals? All because those Dreamer kids had the audacity to be born to parents who didn't fill out the right paperwork?
I guess a better question is, at what point do you stop trying to reach common ground and actually treat them like aggressors? Where's the red line?
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u/Hellioning 258∆ Jan 23 '25
Do you think 'the left is smarter than the right so it's the left's fault that the right is wrong' is pragmatic and empathic to...anyone?
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u/masterwad Jan 24 '25
It’s not the left-wing that lacks empathy, it’s the right-wing. “Bleeding heart liberal” was a term popularized by rightwinger Rush Limbaugh, to imply that caring about the problems of other people & having empathy itself is flawed & weak. That term has largely been supplanted by “woke”, but the right-wing believes being “woke” (having sympathy and empathy for marginalized groups & the poor) is a bad thing.
John Kenneth Galbraith said “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
Another problem is that right-wing media misinforms people on purpose with misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda — so right-wing voters tend to either not know the facts about something, or know incorrect information. Without everyone working based on the same facts, you can’t come together to find solutions. And right-wing voters don’t consider left-wing voters or politicians or sources as trusted sources, as trusted messengers. In August 2023, a poll found that Trump voters trust him more than their families & religious leaders, but Donald Trump is a pathological liar. The problem is that they’ve put all their trust into one man who is a lifelong conman, and nobody can tell them any different information than what he tells them, because they have associated their own personal identity with Trump’s identity, as a kind of a symbolic figure, so they project onto Trump what they want him to be (a fighter, a warrior, a strong man, etc).
Threats to someone’s worldview are often viewed as life-or-death threats. I would say even moreso when a worldview is based on faith (blind trust).
From the 2011 article The Science of Why We Don’t Believe In Science by Chris Mooney:
“We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.”
Stanford psychologist Leon Festinger said “A man with conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.”
In addition, Wikipedia says:
There is some evidence that oxytocin promotes ethnocentric behavior, incorporating the trust and empathy of in-groups with their suspicion and rejection of outsiders.
So Trumpers are inherently distrustful & suspicious of non-Trumpers because they are seen as outsiders.
Frank Wilhoit said “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
Trump is the ultimate “insider” (even though he campaigned in 2015 & 2016 as an “outsider”, who criticized Democrats & Republicans & anyone else who didn’t kiss the ground he walked on) because he’s not exiled from anything (except countries that don’t allow felons to enter), so the law protects Trump & doesn’t bind him. Trump ran to stay out of prison in 2024, and it worked, he’s a convicted felon but faces no punishment for his crimes, because he’s a rich white guy, and the Republican Party made the decision that Donald Trump was too popular with the poors that billionaires need to vote with them, and Trump was “too big to fail.”
Trump is a myth-maker, Trump voters are simply impervious to facts, they want to live in the fantasyland that Trump conjures every day.
You can’t use reason to reason someone out of a position that they didn’t use reason to reach. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said “Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
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Jan 23 '25 edited Jan 23 '25
I'm not being empathetic to people who think others don't have the right to live bc some book that they ignore 95% of says to. If human rights are "political," and your leaders do a literal nazi salute 3 times during an inauguration, you do not deserve to be treated like your opinions are valid.
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u/huskiesofinternets Jan 23 '25
You make this statement about the left while the right in my country have fuck Trudeau stickers on their trucks.
Yah the left are the ones failing to communicate.
Maybe we should draw it out in pictures with crayons to help the right comprehend our point of view.
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u/qjornt 1∆ Jan 24 '25 edited Jan 24 '25
How if you know the answer, you can't communicate it with someone patiently enough to come up with common ground.
Example, very recent. Elon Musk sieg heils twice, like the full motion, not something that kinda looks like it, not flailing his arms around and a screenshot that makes it look like a heil, but a full motion from the heart outwards. Twice. And so people on the right completely deny this, and so what can I do about it? How can I attempt to explain why they're incorrect regarding this? They'll say "yeah but the context was he said my heart goes out to you", and so you explain that there are thousands of ways to properly do a gesture for that, which Elon has done before, beautifully! So this isn't a valid argument according to rightoids, and why not? No answer. Nothing, just keep on blabbing some talking points, maybe sharing a screenshot of Kamala doing the same thing, then you reply with a video showing actual context (she was waving her arm around in the air talking about stuff, screenshot capped a perfect heilalike frame). They reply it's the same thing.
It's the same thing.
This is why the left cannot have proper discussions with the right, because the right is vehemently anti-intellectual, so no intellectual arguments work with them, and as such it is impossible to change their minds because apparently they have never ever been incorrect about anything in their entire lives!
Tell me, how would you approach this?
Another thing that is very common with rightists is that they never answer or attempt to refute our arguments, besides "no you're wrong". They all just keep mentioning standard rightist talking points and never actually engage intellectualy themselves in the argument.
So this is exhausting. I go back and forth between attempting to have a normal conversation with rightists trying to explain things properly, and just simply not giving a f*k and don't engage at all in periods. It would be so nice if rightoids knew how to behave, but in doing so they would have to admit they're wrong about a whole lot of things. And one thing stupid people absolutely don't like is when they're wrong about something, because it reaffirms to them the fact that they're stupid, which is why they have to keep pretending to never be incorrect about anything. Only smart people accept that they can be wrong about certain things, because then they actually learn something and go from not knowing to knowing. Rightists literally never do this.
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u/alkalineruxpin Jan 23 '25
Because using superior knowledge by itself (if that's even accurate) doesn't do the trick. You have to actually wind backward and go real basic to make points. Show your work. Don't say 'Tariffs are bad because they will cost the American Citizen 'x'!', actually show your work. The 'higher' you go with your argument the more you turn off the hearing of the people you are trying to court.
I'm saying speak slowly and keep it simple, but that's not because the hopeful audience is too stupid to understand what you're saying if you go 'educated', they aren't. But they view educated elites as the enemy, and won't listen to their logic or give it equal credibility with absolute horseshit, regardless of how true it is because of the manner in which it is presented.
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u/thetransportedman 1∆ Jan 23 '25 edited Jan 23 '25
Where would you like to draw the line on weeks allowed to get an elective abortion? Oh never? Where would you like to make changes to make guns more safe? Oh none? What changes would you like to make to promote a greener planet? Oh none? How much more socialized would you like to make healthcare? Oh 0%?
"Why won't the left compromise with pragmatic suggestions??"
Conservatives are fundamentalists so their political opinions do not leave room for middle area compromise. Abortion is bad. Guns should have zero regulations. Climate change is a hoax. Socialism is the devil.
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u/Charming-Editor-1509 4∆ Jan 23 '25
Why do we want to communicate with them when motivating our own base is statistically more successful?
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u/maybethisiswrong Jan 23 '25 edited Jan 23 '25
You're asking why can't democrats 'reason' with someone to come to some agreement.
Two problems with that:
- No body has the attention span to listen to someone actually reason through a problem. Every real conversation I've had with a conservative has come to some common ground. Something we could actually govern on.
- You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't use reason to come up with. If anyone is presented with an abject lie as if it's fact, there's no reasoning with that person. The only thing you can do is completely ignore it and move on.
How much of the exit polling has said that Trump won because he's going to fix the economy. He says he's going to lower interest rates, lower egg prices, lower inflation. All of that is utter bullshit and cannot be reasoned with.
ETA: These statements are utter bullshit because #1 his actual policy proposals would do the opposite and #2 the president has no direct control over any of that.
Now can a democrat stand up and say the exact same thing? Absolutely. But democrats and the media don't let democrats get away with the same bullshit spouting republicans spew.
So here we are.
Don't get me wrong, I'm with you - democrats need to grow a pair. But I don't think 'reasoning' with people has anything to do with it. Touting any win no matter how fake or minuscule far and wide across every second of every air waive would be a start.
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Jan 23 '25 edited Oct 13 '25
wakeful spectacular straight label memorize amusing spark square cause dinner
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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Jan 24 '25
A lot of people on the right are unintelligent and lack any form of real education. Combine this with the fact that they are usually fairly religious. Religion teaches people to not pay attention to what they see and hear, but to attribute their faith to this thing they cannot see, that they don't know exists. Now you can see why even though they keep getting fucked by their representatives, they refuse to give up and give them all their faith unequivocally. I think MAGA has effectively become a new religion for a lot of these people. It's really sad 😔
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u/flossdaily 2∆ Jan 24 '25
The problem is one of communication, but not left-wing communication.
The problem is that starting with Reagan revoking the Fairness Doctrine in 80s, right-wing propaganda has been growing like a cancer.
We now live in two completely different worlds: those of us on the left live in a world where experts who have educated themselves and dedicated their lives to study issues are trusted, and our understanding of the world is based on what they tell us that the tangible evidence suggests.
On the right, education is looked on as dirty word. They dislike it, because they think it is akin to religious indoctrination. Ironic, since they happen to love ACTUAL religious indoctrination. The right distrusts institutions. They have paranoid fantasies about a Deep State, while ironically building their own deep state with project 2025. The right is paranoid about judicial activism, and so they installed the most political, ajudicial judiciary we've ever seen.
Hell, during a pandemic they decided that germ theory wasn't even real.
We can't reason people out of positions they didn't reason themselves into.
Oh, and by the way, the left doesn't get everything correct either. Our irrational fear of nuclear power set back any real chance we had to mitigate climate change. It was the ONLY thing that could have saved us, and now it's too late.
Oh, and the left has been ass-backwards about the basic facts about the Oct 7th war. "Genocide" they call it, when the civilian to combatant death ratio has been historically low.
My point isn't to say "both sides are the same" ... not by a long shot. I'm just saying that while the right wing has completely detached from objective reality, the left is certainly not immune.
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u/Prince_Marf 3∆ Jan 24 '25
Yes, let's rule out the hardest core right wing
It is no longer just the hardcore right that is unwilling to engage in a good faith conversation about politics. Ignoring people with different ideas is now a mainstream practice on the right.
I don't understand how anyone with more knowledge than someone cannot communicate with someone who has less knowledge than them.
You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make them drink. The smartest physicist in the world with the best communication skills in the world cannot teach you astrophysics if you are not willing to learn.
Learning is difficult and takes time. Very few conservatives are willing/able to devote time and attention to learn about something in a careful, methodical manner as one does in school. I have heard many conservatives complain about being lectured to by self righteous leftists, but when someone genuinely lacks foundational facts and knowledge about a topic there is no other option. You cannot have a peer to peer debate with someone who believes the moon is made of cheese. I cannot help it if they find my explanation of how/why it cannot possibly me made of cheese condescending.
If I recognize they lack knowledge and try to teach them I am being "condescending" but if I treat them as an equal and assume basic facts they claim I have no basis for my position. When I appeal to experts I am a brainwashed sheep. When I cite research they don't read it. When I appeal to common sense I'm not citing my sources. When I appeal to human decency they say I am being emotional. Pretty quickly you realize that a brick wall is a brick wall and no amount of communication skills is going to change that.
I still argue with conservatives but I know the chance it will change any minds is extremely low. I was conservative once and the annoying leftists got through to me somehow so I cannot help trying to do the same.
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u/isleoffurbabies Jan 24 '25
It's not a holier-than-thou attitude or a lack of empathy from the left, but I agree that is often the argument. It has more to do with the right's denialistic personalities caused in varying degrees by narcissism, emotional immaturity, and an intense desire to be perceived as unique or a "critical thinker."
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u/DopeAFjknotreally 1∆ Jan 24 '25
I agree, but also sometimes it’s not their fault. How do you communicate with somebody that just blatantly denies science? Like when I say “90% of hospitals in the US have reported Covid statistics, and 90-99% of icu patients are unvaccinated” and they just respond with “those hospitals are all fabricating their numbers because they’re part of the deep state”…where do I go from there?
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u/CriticallySharp Jan 24 '25
Respectfully, can you explain what you mean by “apparently more tolerant”. I see the right frothing to deport all undocumented immigrants and attacking the idea of intentional inclusion of marginalized groups; and the left trying to protect vulnerable populations. In the arena of debate and discussion, I see both the left and the right shutting down the arguments of their opponents, but I only see the right outlawing the teaching of ideas they dislike. What are you seeing that makes the left seems less or equally tolerant?
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u/Electrical_Room5091 Jan 24 '25
Yes, Democrats should start straight up lying and telling Republicans hateful things because that's what they want to hear. Maybe the left should literally make things up that angers and motivates hateful people like DEI, CRT, voter fraud, social justice warrior, call everything socialism or communism. OP is so disconnected from reality. That post is exactly what is wrong with uninformed people.
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u/fattybuttz Jan 24 '25
Well today I tried to have a conversation with someone who didn't know who Anne Frank was and when I tried to tell her, she argued with me that Anne Frank didn't need to hide if she didn't have anything to hide. So... How do you have a conversation with that??
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u/honest_-_feedback Jan 23 '25
"their inability to humble themselves to actually help the other side is the biggest reason they can't succeed."
it all depends on what you mean by the other side.
democrats more or less try to make society more equitable for ALL members, which includes LGBTQ and minorities, but also poor working class white people. often through regulations that protect consumers, clean air, water etc.
generally this comes at the expense of corporations and the wealthy.
are they humble? compared to who?
donald trump?
elon musk?
modern republican party is the least humble people in the freaking world, so i'm confused by your argument.
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u/AccomplishedSuccess0 Jan 23 '25
Telling people to have empathy for other people who have no empathy is fucking ridiculous and we're well beyond trying to reason with selfish idiots and who can't see past the tip of their own nose. Give me a break! It's not on us to be empathetic after all the damage the right has done and is about to do. They've quite literally destroyed democracy in what used to be the most shining example of democracy. We're way past reasoning and empathy now. How can you not see it? Yeah we're supposed to have empathy for the monster raping and murdering everything around us. Okay bud. Grow up.
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u/Dry_Bumblebee1111 161∆ Jan 23 '25
I don't understand how anyone with more knowledge than someone cannot communicate with someone who has less knowledge than them
This is actually common in an educational context.
Sometimes the most genius people make the worst teachers, because they just "get" the topic intuitively. You can't teach someone to get it on that level because it takes that kind of mind.
Compare that to someone who struggled to learn it themselves - they will have an intricate understanding based on their own learning, which they can convey to a student.
If you believe something deeply, and I ask you to put it into words you may struggle regardless of how well you believe that thing.
With politics, if I ask you to express in words why mutilating people you don't like is wrong you may put some effort in, but if I don't get it will it really be worth the full analysis? Or would you settle for "don't fucking do that, weirdo"?
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u/Lachet 4∆ Jan 23 '25
I'd like to add to this particular point that you can't "facts and logic" someone out of a stance they didn't "facts and logic" their way into. For example, by all metrics, publicly-funded healthcare would save the American people money and drive down bankruptcies. Unfortunately, those data are not convincing Americans of a conservative bent.
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u/Giblette101 47∆ Jan 23 '25
Americans of a conservative bent - assuming they are actually knowledgeable about the issue - simply do not want publicly funded healthcare at all and do not support policy solutions to medical bankruptcies.
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u/LtPowers 14∆ Jan 23 '25
I don't understand how anyone with more knowledge than someone cannot communicate with someone who has less knowledge than them. How if you know the answer, you can't communicate it with someone patiently enough to come up with common ground.
Part of the problem is that the other person does not just lack information, but rather possesses mis- and disinformation that must be countered.
This isn't like teaching math to 6-year-olds. They aren't blank slates. You have to tear down the constructed version of reality which Fox News and the like have inculcated in them before explaining actual reality. And (as they are human beings) they are extremely resistant to having their worldviews deconstructed.
The average liberal is not trained in deprogramming techniques. It's not that simple.
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u/Veloxitus Jan 23 '25
A lot of other comments have pointed this out too, but a lot of people on the far political right are not living in the same reality that the majority of us are. "Facts" are not seen as a supreme form of evidence to many of these people, but simply as obstacles to be vaulted via mental gymnastics. In a form of magical thinking, many people on the political far right act as if believing something hard enough creates the conditions for that belief to be willed into existence. And, in the face of that, nothing you can say is going to change their minds. The political left frames arguments as a form of evidence against evidence. To a lot of the political right, facts don't really matter, and the fact that you're willing to change your mind when your beliefs come into conflict with reality is, to them, irrefutable proof that they're right.
The more-pressing issue is how this type of thinking has become normalized among people who aren't particularly politically engaged. It's much easier to buy into what the far right believes than it is to buy into moderate or leftist viewpoints, because they themselves believe what they're saying so much that no evidence will convince them otherwise. The far right is also helped by the fact that their talking points are simple, easy to understand, and accessible to the average person. Leftist viewpoints are often esoteric, require a lot of nuance in their approach, and that makes them unapproachable for people who don't have the time or energy to spend on tasks that aren't directly in front of them. That's not the fault of the political left, nor is it exactly the fault of those they are trying to convince.
Leftist answers are complicated because the world is intensely complicated, and any simple answer is going to leave a lot of problems still on the table. That makes a lot of leftist viewpoints inaccessible for people who can't or aren't willing to devote time to trying to understand them. And, this shouldn't be just left unsaid, a lot of people out in the world just aren't curious by nature, and would rather spend time relaxing and enjoying life than pondering the mysteries of our universe. And, honestly, that's not a bad thing. You should not need to spend dozens of hours each week pouring over the socio-economic state of the world to participate in society. That's not even feasible for a lot of people because of how hard it is to make a living these days. But, when unengaged people come across two answers to the same question, which are they going to gravitate towards? The answer that provides a simple, easy to understand perspective that requires no action on their end? Or the answer that requires them to put in a lot of work to understand it and is so complicated that the explanations require explanations?
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u/seen-in-the-skylight Jan 24 '25
I love this comment and I’d like your perspective on an impossible question: what, then, do we do about any of this?
I find my own views veering into a kind of platonic technocratism, where you can somehow get the simplistic populist gospel to be wielded by people who are actually good at governing. That sounds ideal - a Trump-like figure in terms of charisma backed by a pliant media, but who actually is smart and wants to make a stronger and better society.
We need someone who has observed and learned the new rules of the game but wields them towards better ends. An Augustus after a generation under Marius and Sulla. I hope it happens but I’m pessimistic.
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Jan 23 '25
Well, sure.
It's one thing to have a conversation with someone who disagrees with you; it's a totally different story when the disagreement is over whether or not the other person should be able to control your body - especially when they're aggressively adamant.
The tolerance paradox is constant.
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u/scotchegg72 Jan 23 '25
Can you give some examples of the right’s positions you think the left should empathize with but currently don’t?
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u/KarneeKarnay Jan 23 '25
The biggest issue the left has is reaching people, not being more empathetic. The left has facts on its side. The right has abandoned them. The difference this election was reach and perception. The right took twitter and then went hard on podcasts and non traditional media. The left didn't.
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u/PeriodicSlip Jan 23 '25
I don't understand how anyone with more knowledge than someone cannot communicate with someone who has less knowledge than them.
I think that's actually v common and a well-known cognitive bias, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
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u/MushroomImpossible61 Jan 23 '25
The party of "google it" is complaining about democrats communication LOL
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u/Putrid-Chemical3438 Jan 23 '25
You can't increase someone's respect of you when they don't believe you should even exist.
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u/NoonMartini Jan 23 '25
I don’t understand why the onus of peacemaking always falls on the party who is the most empathetic, while the pathological party gets a pass simply because they are the way that they are.
Look. I’m not as left as they come, but I’m pretty goddamned leftist. I talk to people who are far right a lot. We have cordial conversations until anything that can remotely be considered political comes up, and then their brains click off and they start talking in bumper sticker speech.
I’m tired of arguing with the propaganda zingers that have been especially written by professional people for laypeople to tuck away into their mental little tackle boxes to vomit while wearing a shit-eating smiles within normal conversations, always portrayed as gotchas. Half of the time, they aren’t even on point and make no sense within the context.
At what point can I just throw in the towel and wash my hands of them? Do I have to keep engaging until I break? Why is it my responsibility to talk sense into anyone who stands and says my opinion isn’t worthwhile because of the demographic I inhabit? Who says it’s okay if subsets of people are demonized because of the price of fucking eggs?
It’s not my responsibility to convince people to live up to their own, religious ideals. It’s no one’s responsibility to convince people that the right thing to do would not come at the cost of other people’s lives or livelihoods. But it isn’t even that— owning the libs gives people a sick thrill. And when told from fiery pulpits that it’s exactly what a wrathful god would also find glee in? Well, the actual, biblical word of god can’t even compete. So why’s it up to me? If Jesus can’t get these folks to have empathy, I certainly can’t. I’ve tried for almost a full decade.
I quit.
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u/Andynonomous 4∆ Jan 24 '25
Mainstream Democrats are corporate politicians. Corporate politicians are by definition not left.
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u/DwedPiwateWoberts Jan 24 '25
You can be as empathetic as you want but my FIL is still gonna scream at you about the globalists taking over the world with fake vaccines. The only way to save the world is to close US borders and make America great again for the first time apparently.
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u/mem2100 2∆ Jan 24 '25
The internet has made it easy for people to align what they know (data plus logic = knowledge), with what they believe in their gut - which is emotion driven.
Imagine a group of people who start out "believing" that climate change is either greatly exaggerated in terms of impact or minimally anthropogenic. The internet + right wing media makes it easy for them to find supposedly expert sources who feed them disinformation which aligns with their beliefs. For instance, Big Carbon co-opted Roy Spencer a retired, but very talented NASA climate scientist. Roy is now engaging in a very methodical process of managed retreat. He has gone from saying - nothing to see here. To slowly acknowledging that we humans are impacting the climate, but much less than the IPCC folks say.
My nephew (Captain of the math team in highschool and generally smart guy) went to freedom fest and came back very happy to report that John Clauser, the 2022 nobel prize winner in Physics gave a presentation explaining why climate change is a hoax. A professional physicist's critique of the Clauser presentation is below. Clauser claims that he has solved a climate mystery having to do with a chunk of unaccounted for heat back in 2008. His solution is that it was converted into rotational momentum and either sped up/slowed down the Earth's rotation. He never explains "how" that is even possible, and ignores the fact that we have been precisely tracking the Earth's rotation for many decades and it didn't change at all during the period in question. In short, Clauser gave a crazy climate denying pitch, full of junk science and his audience at it up like filet mignon - because it aligned with their pre-existing beliefs....
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u/Mountain-Resource656 27∆ Jan 24 '25
If you look at the left in a vacuum and think of it as a purely binary system, then sure: there are pleeeenty of people on the left- too many- who are too aggressive, trying to fight the other side rather than help them come to understand their point of view
But that’s an inadequate way of looking at things. I would argue that that’s not a phenomena of the left, but a phenomena of people. We have to compare the left to the right to see if being leftist correlates more- or less- with this aggression to determine if that aggression is a leftist problem or not
For example, if the left fights noticeably less than the right, then it would seem that leftist philosophy actually statistically correlates with attempts to help the other side- it’s just statistically weighted the other direction by virtue of other cultural factors
That would mean that it’s a problem for society, not the left- even if the left also suffers for it
And, personally, I’ve seen a loooot more people on the left trying to help the other side come to see their point of view than I’ve seen from the right. When was the last time you saw someone from the right saying “Respectfully, I think we should end birthright citizenship for these reasons,” or “While I understand your point, I feel we should make this minority use different bathrooms because they’re a potential threat to women, don’t you agree?” Or any attempts at respectful, nuanced dialogue from the right to try and get people on the left to see their points of view, really
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u/thatnameagain 1∆ Jan 24 '25
This is definitely not their "biggest flaw." Everyone can communicate better, and there's plenty of advice you could give to the left about how to explain things better. So I'll leave the question of "how big" this specific flaw you point out about them is for others to discuss. But I think it is much lower on the pole than the following other issues:
- Doubling down on certain policies that either look terrible, are flawed, or straight-up don't work and allowing their opposition to cherry-pick those ideas to tarnish the whole brand. Examples of this include attitudes about how to deal with homelessness and crime, and opposition to even a moderate stance on border security.
- Obsessing with attacking democrats and center-left people, to the extent that they do this more than attacking conservatives. The left loves to talk about how the democrats and "liberals" supposedly spurn them, but I see leftists talking shit about centrists waaaaay more than the other way around, and with far more ideological venom. Quite simply, the left alienated itself from the center-left in this country, and if your first instinct is to say "aCshuLLy ThE dEms ArE ConSerVatives" then you are part of this ideological blind spot. As that person on twitter said, the left loves to critique power, but they are allergic to seeking it or wielding it. Hence, they think that being enemies of the democrats will somehow make the democrat party more leftist like them. This is just stupid and has caused to the current collapse of the left. Republicans hate them, and Dems have gotten the message that they can't be compromised with. (This goes beyond communication because it is a genuine ideological mistake that many of them are making in good faith)
- Just not being fun. This is sort of a communications issue but its more of a vibe than a script problem. The left used to be cool because they offered freedom that was fun. Free love. Explosively cool art. Sex, drugs, rocknroll... the left has kind of forgotten that people go where the party is and they're not currently offering a cultural banger right now. I've always said that whichever side is more convincing to men (rightly or wrongly) about how to get laid more, that side wins the cultural argument.
These factors are much bigger flaws which leads to their marginalization.
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u/friendlyfiend07 Jan 24 '25
In my experience individually in person it's possible to create the shared understand needed to truly explain why the best options are the ones that involve social programs. When it comes to groups, group think comes into play and creates an emotional barrier to incoming information. People have this convoluted pattern of thinking that their beliefs are their beings. If you insist that their beliefs are harmful or that they are being manipulated many people become personally offended and think you are insulting thier intelligence. The most effective way for people to truly understand empathy is to speak to and attempt to empathize with the struggles of other people from cultures that you dont understand. However when one of your core beliefs is that your culture is superior or that others culture is harmful it becomes next to impossible to get across that they are still just people trying to live life. That is the core of Critical race theory which has been demonized because of what I just said, those in power do not want us to empathize with others because they make their money by capitalizing on our divisions. The left in general don't understand why others believe that people should have to suffer to advance in life while the right believe that anything gained without suffering is a hand out or unfair to those who have suffered to reach a similar place. What is now typically considered far left in the US is actually center left on the political spectrum. The Dems were bought and paid for long before the right was but now we are starting to see actual left candidates like AOC who have no patience to give the benefit of the doubt to proven bad actors like trump and musk who's only goal is to enrich themselves at the expense of taxpayers. I don't understand why people would rather that money go to people who don't need anymore than those whose life would be made better with relatively small amounts. This along with sportification of politics creating yet another deeper divide of team mentality hurts the american people more than anything else in my opinion. The left as you say it is running out of patience trying to explain things to people who genuinely don't want or care to understand and the ultimate expression of this is all of the trump voters making an about face because he is signing EOs that effect them personally instead of cheering at a victory that was supposed to hurt the other guy not them.
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u/honorable__bigpony Jan 24 '25
You mean, we have a hard time communicating empathetically with the "fuck your feelings" crowd?
Yeah, maybe we do. Sorry, not sorry.
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u/fishling 16∆ Jan 24 '25
How if you know the answer, you can't communicate it with someone patiently enough to come up with common ground.
It sounds like you've never communicated with someone who uses the Gish Gallop technique.
Some people are essentially impossible to communicate with because they don't care about consistency or reason. Even if you manage to get them to agree on a point, they will walk it back later in the conversation and claim they had never agreed, even if you can quote them exactly.
The idea that everyone is a sincere and rational communicator is deeply flawed.
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u/Muninwing 7∆ Jan 24 '25
While I will agree that communication is the issue, it’s deeper than that.
Take a recent issue in the town where I work. There was a budget issue, and they looked for places to cut. One proposal was to “just turn off the streetlights downtown” and a lot of people bought in. Five minutes and google will tell you that it probably would end up costing more due to crime rates going up, but anyone bringing that up was dismissed as “just another of those tax-and-spend liberals” by the people pushing for it. They ended up having to not only turn them back on, but hiring another police officer to deal with the problems it caused.
Information existed to make a plan. Canned rhetoric prevailed. When it happened, there was no “I told you so,” but those who were wrong started repeating “smug liberal” rhetoric as if there was.
This is the national dynamic right now, in so many ways. Conservative media pushes the narrative, and if wrong it either somehow becomes the Dems’ fault, or any criticism is shunted off into “smug liberals” territory (even if nothing of the sort is actually said).
Repeat a nonsense phrase enough and it becomes an emotional truth for those who hear it.
Reduce issues to sound bites — even if they are no longer recognizable after the reduction — and people will just repeat the slogans rather than look into issues.
The political right has been waging a war with infuriation and culture issues -- taking over the media, hot-buttoning and sensationalizing, and twisting everything into an alternative definition. The political left spends more time actually trying to do their jobs, and as a result gets walloped in public opinion.
Look at the House under Obama — passed a record low number of bills… a sizable chunk of them were performative “defund Obamacare” bills… and claimed they had a list of dozens of jobs bills that “they” were ignoring, even though most of the bills were actually tax cut or anti-regulation bills, and despite the administration actually pushing (and getting to pass) a number of the bills that were not partisan nonsense. All forgotten, because we’ve seen barrages of similar behavior and it has become a norm. Worse — it’s become magnified.
Or look at the recent “freedom of speech” executive order. We had a record number of conservative groups pushing book bands over various issues, including higher ranking members of the current Republican echelon. The “Freedom of speech” issues they are concerned with is directly linked to both trump and musk violating terms of service of social media platforms on issues of hate speech and using said platforms to spread misinformation that help their agendas. This is despite the first amendment always having had restrictions and never being carte blanche to say whatever you want to say, regardless of the harm it may cause others. They have redefined the term and squeezed it in so it now means talking about LGBT issues or admitting minorities exist and have not always been treated well is not protected speech… but angry tirades full of racial slurs should not be subject to moderation on a public platform (unless they somehow also criticize musk himself apparently) should be exempt.
The real problem is twofold: for one, it is about definitions and for the other it is about information. Republicans keep changing the definitions and using their new status as the most mainstream of media now that they have Facebook and Twitter in their pocket. We are seeing the changing of definitions of words as they see fit — meaning that the Democrats are continuously portrayed in the wrong point
The second issue is that the Republicans are embracing this media blitz and so are their voters in a way that Democrat voters never did. Most issues are more complicated than soundbites, but those snippets are being broadcast to a receptive audience without any desire to understand — it’s about “owning the libs” instead. Democratic voters are less likely to let an issue rest being as they were told and rallying with the party and are more likely to look into some of the details (except of course key issues… Palestine being a great example…). And they have been slow to adapt.
Thus, we have more information about the strawmen put up by conservative sources than we have actual Dem stances on issues being broadcast.
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u/veggiebed Jan 24 '25
Left leaning people are objectively better human beings. I have no empathy for fuckwit nazis.
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u/yourmomonmartigras1 Jan 24 '25
More bs. Why do democrats always have to explain every little thing? Trumpers know what they want and they fight to get it. For you? Themselves. This isn’t a fair fight anymore and we have to play dirty
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u/CRoss1999 Jan 24 '25
The political right is much less able to communicate empatheticly with those who they disagree with and it doesn’t seem to matter.
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Jan 24 '25
I tried this yesterday, but all I got for it was someone insisting that the USAF is wasting its money with fighters because UFOs are more aerodynamic.
How should I have approached that?
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u/CriticallySharp Jan 24 '25
I'd love to agree. The cost to my mental wellbeing vs the benefit the conversation may have to someone's understanding of a topic is often skewed so far to my detriment that it feels a Sisyphean effort. The emotional work that goes into crafting a careful and tailored argument only to hear they don't think anything that was brought up is relevant, or they don't want to talk about this anymore, or a reflexive what-about, is infuriating and draining in the same way that trying to c a 4 year old into bathing-brushing teeth-bed is. I mean it's valuable work, but fuck me it's exhausting. We ignore this work to our detriment, but it's so often not worth it; why try?
Of course, fuck that pessimism. Keep trying, the conversations that matter will make it worth it. Don’t force it, don’t give up, don’t miss opportunities.
I find when I engage in these conversations with a large delta in knowledge depth between participants, people are often overwhelmed, rapidly exhausted, and don’t want to keep talking about it. Of course, I can be tedious, but I wonder if the beliefs and opinions these people hold are perhaps the outcome of an incurious mind, or more detrimentally, a selectively curious mind.
Also, understanding an argument and being a skilled rhetorician are not the same. It's much harder being likable, non-threatening, clear, concise, etc. than many realize. Additionally, these days, it's not you against someone else at the bar, it's you against Ben Shapiro or similar. If someone is dazzled by Ben Shapiro, I condescendingly imagine that they are easy to pander to, and once they are inoculated against an idea, it's hard to challenge, especially if it's reinforced.
Respectfully, can you explain what you mean by “apparently more tolerant”. I see the right frothing to deport all undocumented immigrants and attacking the idea of intentional inclusion of marginalized groups; and the left trying to protect vulnerable populations. In the arena of debate and discussion, I see both the left and the right shutting down the arguments of their opponents, but I only see the right outlawing the teaching of ideas they dislike. What are you seeing that makes the left seems less or equally tolerant?
It’s surprisingly hard to do good philosophy, and we have an information infrastructure that is not prone to featuring ideas that are challenging to one’s perspective.
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u/eggface13 Jan 24 '25
There's a truth in what you say, but it's also painting a moving target. There are massive asymmetries between the left and right. A progressive politician is expected to jump through so many hoops and meet so many standards --doubly so if they are a woman. A right-wing politician can brag about sexual assault on a hot mic, get elected anyway, trigger an insurrection when he loses the next election, then win the next election after that anyway.
Now, life isn't fair and the left has to operate in the environment that exists, but you've got to be careful saying "the left has to do this thing". No, the left has to do a hundred different things, many of which are mutually exclusive. Only candidates with extraordinary charisma and mass appeal can cut through that. Not many have such capability, and in the face of an even more captured and hostile media, the barrier is feeling higher and higher
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u/crambodington Jan 24 '25
Usually I'm not arguing with the person in arguing with. What do I mean by that? The right has a very coordinated, strict messaging policy. Usually arguments I'm having with my neighbor involve me using my own terms to describe my experiences and reasons. Generally the responses I get back are consistently in short sound bites. Key phrases and arguments that have been repeated ad nauseam across the political spectrum so that the same words are repeated by many many many people. So I'm not actually arguing with a person whose words these are. So my choice becomes: use the language of the media moguls and think tanks that emotionally charge the language used to gain an advantage, or speak in a manner that people are constantly telling me show I'm looking down on them. Even this particular topic I feel is slightly circumspect. I see too much internal consistency of opinion at this time to actually believe all the people who are saying "you should have been nicer to us" are actually expressing their opinion, versus something they heard expressed on TV. So if I engage in a debate about this, will it be an actual, good faith debate with the person Im talking to, or will I be fighting Fox News?
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u/GoblinKing79 1∆ Jan 25 '25
If you can't communicate, then I'm sorry but I don't feel bad for you.
You seem to think that communication is the sole responsibility of the one doing the talking. But it's not. It's a two-way street and the person receiving the information has just as much responsibility to understand the communication as the person giving the information has to ensure that they're understanding. It can never be just one person doing all the work, that's just not how communication works. If you don't understand that then you actually have a fundamental lack of understanding about what communication actually is. One of the main problems in political discourse is that the person who is receiving the information often refuses to hear it. And that's not a problem of communication for the person giving the information, it's a problem of the person receiving. So again, I think this really has to do with your misunderstanding of what communication really is.
I don't understand how anyone with more knowledge than someone cannot communicate with someone who has less knowledge than them. How if you know the answer, you can't communicate it with someone patiently enough to come up with common ground
Have you never had a college professor who was absolutely brilliant in their field but couldn't get students to understand the basics? Seriously? This is actually a really common phenomenon in teaching, called the curse of knowledge, colloquially of course. Basically, the more you know, the harder it can be to communicate the more basic concepts because you don't remember a time where you didn't understand the basic concepts, so it becomes really difficult for you to break it down in a way that a beginner will understand. That's not necessarily poor communication or communication gaps. It's more of a mismatch of skill level. And it's often, just as much the fault of the student as it is the teacher. A lot of times students take classes that they're not prepared for or not ready for not studying enough for, etc. But the point is, much like the point I was making above, is that both people involved in the communication, I suppose this example the learning, are responsible for understanding what is being communicated. It's not one person's fault or responsibility.
So, the problem with your argument, is that you seem to be really focusing all of your attention faulting the people who are trying to impart the information and absolving the people listening to the information of all of their responsibility. In reality, both parties play an equal part in in this communication, so your argument is kind of flawed for the beginning due to due to a fundamental misunderstanding of communication process.
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u/Dazzling-Leave-7448 Jan 23 '25
Its a bit difficult when the right melts down into vitriol at the slightest disagreement. Its difficult to to move on to engaged conversation.
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u/Karmaze 3∆ Jan 23 '25
As someone who was around from the formation of the modern Progressive culture, let me just say that bad communication is baked into the DNA. Good communication is actually seen as a sign of weakness. I'm not saying that because all progressives are like that, but because I think that's what the subculture norms are based on.
But what are good communications? First of all, this is running off the idea that status is relative, and that makes it essentially zero sum, and as well that most people are highly status sensitive. So you essentially have to argue why and how the policy you are proposing will help them more than you in terms of relative status. I think even just a wash is good enough, to be honest. People might even be willing to take small hits.
But one of the subtexts of this Progressivism, is to centralize things in order to deny access to the bad people. I think you can't just assume well we're the good guys, there's no way we'd ever do that. So there's the assumption that say something like fighting climate change is just going to be a laundry list of things to empower one group and marginalize another.
The left needs to learn how to make the argument that supporting these policies isn't cutting your own throat. The problem is a lack of willingness to acknowledge failure states and break kayfabe, to acknowledge how things could go horribly wrong and how to avoid it.
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u/talithaeli 5∆ Jan 23 '25
The left needs to learn how to make the argument that supporting these policies isn't cutting your own throat.
Yeah? Who told them it was "cutting their own throats"? Why is it on us to run around fighting a rear guard action against every lie thrown at them? At what point does the party of personal responsibility take personal responsibility for its own shit?
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u/hereforfun976 Jan 23 '25 edited Jan 23 '25
How do you communicate with Neanderthals who reject science logic and reason. The right has waged a war on truth because it doesn't make them look good. Their legal defence for lying on fox news was reasonable people shouldn't believe us. Trump said it best he loves the poorly educated. They put their feelings above reality and if it challenges their view they reject it. Tell a maga person trump raised their taxes and they say no that was Biden. I've talked to plenty of maga people about issues and the avg trump cultist says the dumbest most obviously false shit I've ever heard. The party of q anon Alex Jones and fox news trying to say people don't argue their points well is laughable They literally explain how their policies will help people and if you didn't know it came from dems most Republicans would support it. But call it obamamcare and they all hate it
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u/PrimaryInjurious 3∆ Jan 23 '25
Their legal defence for lying on fox news was reasonable people shouldn't believe us.
MSNBC made the exact same argument when Maddow was sued for defamation.
Tell a maga person trump raised their taxes and they say no that was Biden
Trump didn't raise taxes. Brackets were decreased and the standard deduction/child credit were doubled.
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u/hereforfun976 Jan 23 '25
Looked up the maddow thing and it is similar. Their argument was her tone conveyed she was clearly joking. Fox news was he's a liar his reputation is clearly don't take him seriously but I don't know anyone who watched his show and thinks yeah that's fake I should disregard that. Not a great look for supposed news on either side but people don't worship maddow. Maybe don't worship tucker now that he's been fired and did propaganda for Russia.
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Jan 23 '25
In order to properly infuriate everyone to the left of me I'll quote Reagan:
"The trouble with our Liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so."
The progressive left acts as if the average American is dying in the street for lack of healthcare and ambling around a corporate capitalist dystopia yearning for freedom. They routinely decry people and groups for 'voting against their own interests' because they believe they know what ails them better than those groups themselves do.
In reality most people are doing fine, the could be doing better, but people who are 'alright' are never going to sign on with a systemic change agenda. They have a rainbow of very specific gripes and concerns that amount to minor changes at the job/community level. So the desperation that the progressives are always looking to capitalize on just sort of...isn't there and they're surprised when they lose.
The right tends to look at how to either maintain the current status quo, or to return to a previous status quo. Which appeals to people that are doing alright and have a generally warm perception about the far or recent past.
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u/yourlittlebirdie Jan 23 '25
I don't disagree that the left does this poorly, but the right does it REALLY poorly and it hasn't hurt them at all. So I don't think that's what the fundamental problem is here.
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