Go. Read the whole thing. But if you are thinking that maybe you don’t really want to travel all the way over there, uphill, in the snow, read this much here:
imagine if the antisocial friends we have online decided to stop being antisocial. What if, and I mean this very seriously, the Chapo boys decided to put on their Little Lord Fauntleroy breeches, and discover their inner Eddie Haskells, and began to check themselves for “politeness” before they addressed a Warren person — or a Bidener, or a Klobucharerer, or a Mayor Pete fan (name people in their movement have been really gross about Mayor Pete) — and began asking themselves, “DOES THIS HELP MY MOVEMENT? COULD I PERSUADE SOME SQUARES WITH SEXY NICENESS?”
Because for all you sneer that “oh mean words matter more than people dying from lack of healthcare?” well, what matters more to you: Getting to say mean words, or people dying from lack of healthcare?
You don’t even have to mean it. You can secretly wish that we all die or get raped or whatever (I hope you don’t wish that, but some of y’all seem to), but out loud, you police yourself and your brothers and sisters: Does. this. help. our movement?
Anyway, that is my idea, and I mean it, and I hope you guys decide to be heroes for your guy, and sacrifice a little of the bile it feels so wonderful to vent. I understand about bile! I promise!
You could give it a stupid name, like the one I came up with already: Grander for Sanders. Find a Warren supporter. Grab her by the arm and help her across the street, metaphorically. I don’t know, offer to wash her lawn or mow her cat.
Because the nihilism is keeping you at a 30 percent ceiling. Chasing off new people is keeping you at a 30 percent ceiling. Coming in hot like Lt. Calley is keeping you at a 30 percent ceiling. Sheeit, shitting on fellow travelers like the fucking democratic socialists at Wonkette is keeping you at a 30 percent ceiling. I know lots of one-time Berners considering a Biden vote, because Biden’s people aren’t emotional terrorists.
And once you start faking niceness, you might find you like it.
It’s a choice! You could make it!
Yes, it’s a tone argument. Yes, your tone doesn’t make things true or false. But as much as people who feel the urgency of the issues on a visceral level might wish otherwise, a large part of the population treats elections in very similar ways to how they treat popularity contests. And, true facts here, tone can help win a popularity contest.
So many of Sanders’ supporters don’t seem to understand that they are blocking Sanders’s message with their constant attacking. Why would anyone go to his website to check out his platform if his supporters are doing this to people.
“tone can help win”
We have always been at war with Eastasia.
“Getting to say mean words, or people dying from lack of healthcare?”
I am in love.
I have been consciously trying to find good things to say about every Democratic candidate, so that whoever wins, I’ll be able to work myself up to a state of enthusiasm toward them. I don’t want to just “hold my nose and vote” — we’re all going to need to get out and canvas, persuade relatives, the works.
The two are not mutually exclusive; the implicit predicate is flawed.
So, silly rhetorical question.
Advocating insincerity is the go? Just don’t get caught at it, lest your credibility plummets.
Whenever I see “can help”, I know that’s a feeble claim — if less feeble than “might help”.
And therefore every bit as meritorious as any tone argument.
(It’s more than that; don’t forget the advocated insincerity)
Tabby @1:
1. How exactly are they supposedly blocking his message? For example, and as you yourself note, he has a website.
2. Why would they not? His supporters aren’t him, and they’re not the ones up for election, he is.
Neither statement makes much sense.
@6: His message is that he wants to be inclusive, and vilifying those who disagree with you tends to push people away. You are often judged by the company you keep, whether it be in person or online, and if you’re trying to paint yourself as the anti-Trump, it doesn’t help your cause when your supporters act like Trump supporters.
publicola:
Well, there you go. Message isn’t blocked for you, is it?
Is he doing the vilifying? Again: the talk has been about his supporters, not about him.
Yes, yes. I do get the claims: yours, that his supporters actually harm his cause , and Tabby’s, that his supporters both block his message (though not for you), and furthermore that they do not realise this.
I just find those claims rather spurious at best.
Basically, the gist of those claims is that, were it not for his supporters, his cause would be heard and supported — the which entails he would have even more supporters.
But fine, you hold that the fewer supporters he has, the more he’d get, and the more he has, the fewer. Which is a weird stance.
Also, kinda perverse and ironic that his supporters are being vilified on the basis that they themselves vilify, because vilification is supposedly counter-productive.
I’m gonna take this as a prompt to make a civil, polite case for Bernie Sanders that doesn’t involve comparing him to any other politician you may look up to or badmouthing anyone that doesn’t deserve it (I’ll gladly adjust my language on anyone’s command, your sensibilities matter to me). Also hoping that you don’t put me on the shelf of “Foreign Influence on the Election” since I’m, you know, mexican.
Starting with the free college proposal, these are my premises:
-It is my understanding that college tuition is both astronomically high in the US and an absolute necessity to make yourself appealing in the jobs marketplace.
-That college debt is a major roadblock to achieve financial stability.
-And, crucially for me to try to tie this into something I believe we all care deeply about, that women stay in abusive relationships because of economic uncertainty and women are less likely than men to get parental support to go to college.
A young woman hoping to go out into the world and make a name for herself runs into the first major obstacle, her father is a misogynistic old-school type idiot who thinks women belong in the kitchen and won’t give her a single cent to aid her pursuit of a higher education. All she can do is get a student loan that will drag her down and give her a systemic disadvantage next to her male peers that are more likely not to need it.
Once out of college she must shoulder the burden of that debt while working entry level jobs (something that would be much easier with a $15 minimum wage). If she makes the mistake of getting involved with an abusive male her financial stability will be held over her head to coerce her to stay and do a whole bunch of things, and said debt will play a major role in that asshole’s leverage (calling abusive men ‘asshole’ is allowed, I hope). And the asshole may not need to be a spouse, it could be the asshole father from earlier, or a pig of a landlord, people in debt are vulnerable to abusers and any progress made on women’s rights won’t matter squat as long as some needle-dick buffoon can coerce women into submission with very real threats of destitution and poverty.
That Tuition-Free College hasn’t been marketed as a feminist initiative could be thought of as a failure of messaging by Bernie Sanders, but it’s better if the feminist aspect of it is kept camouflaged, like Tactical Feminism or something. A lot of dudes are also struggling with student debt, some of them are misogynists. Now, I might be out of line on this, but… If there was a magic word you could say that made even the most rabid misogynist support a feminist agenda, why not use it?
No need to compromise, no need to even lie, you just state the case for tuition-free college and student debt forgiveness and leave out the part where women at large get a major advancement in the road to true emancipation.
That would be the feminist case for Tuition-Free College and Student Debt Forgiveness, at least to the best of my ability to sell it. I’m no expert, this is what I know of it and what I think it would do if implemented.
Looking at the same policy, but through the lens of racial inequality, is a bit more difficult for me, since my understanding of racial relations is more rudimentary than my understanding of feminism. The premises I’m working from are:
-I don’t believe race impacts intelligence in any way.
-I believe that if black and brown people in the US were allowed the opportunity to enter college they would be as good at it as their white peers (probably better, people who fight for their education tend to take it more seriously than those born in the privilege of just having it).
-Reforming the american justice system will be easier if there are more black people involved in it
As far as I know, one of the biggest problems hitting black communities is the endless assault by the judicial power, represented on all levels by brutish thugs in cop uniform beating and killing them, hardass DAs throwing the book at them trying to look “though on crime”, and corrupt, unfeeling shitstain judges who simultaneously lock up black kids for having a blunt on them and let homicidal cops go free.
I’m not going to make the point that Tuition Free College will fix this problem (since that would be insane) but I’ll try to make the point that it could help alleviate it. Just having a handful of token black people in the system is not good enough, being the sole black person in the room will put a lot of pressure on those individuals to conform to the system as-is and, ultimately, prosecute like a white person would, police like a white person would, judge like a white person would. Most people can’t really handle the peer pressure, and they shouldn’t.
However, if the system received a sudden influx of disproportionately black law school graduates (who previously couldn’t even afford to get into the building) that system could be changed from the inside, if black professionals enter the system en masse, they could support each other to overcome the peer pressure that lead the lone black DAs and judges from yesteryear astray.
Also (and maybe I should have lead with this) I’m pretty sure banks are racist in their selection of who gets a student loan in the first place so, leaving aside the black lawyer gambit from above, removing money from the equation will absolutely open up the opportunity for black and brown kids to get a higher education.
And, again, it’s not a messaging failure that people don’t think about Tuition Free College as a policy that addresses Racial Inequality. One thing white racists have been consistently savvy of is the danger that educated blacks bring to their power: teaching slaves to read was illegal in the south, one of the big civil rights battles was desegregating schools, they have seemingly found a loophole “It’s not discrimination if you can’t afford it”. The thing is, being sneaky has massive benefits. They can’t undo your racial justice program if they don’t even know what it was. If you are extra sneaky they may not even notice that you did anything. They’ll just wake up one day and wonder why all the black people got so chill all of a sudden or when did their gated community get so diverse.
And that’s the beauty of Bernie Sanders’ proposals being universal. Even the dipshits who hate you will vote for your benefit and they won’t even know it, it’s for their own benefit too, although those idiots have proven that they will screw themselves to spite you, and that’s the beauty of his messaging: They won’t even think to spite you with it because the benefit to you wasn’t communicated to them
And that’s, off the top of my head, the case for one of Bernie’s policies and why it, and the way it’s being messaged is really good. Similar cases could be made about his other policies, as well as his theory of change. Let me know if you want me to keep talking.
BTW I also hope that saying ‘idiots’ and ‘dipshits’ when talking about misogynists and racists that might be tricked into voting for something good for everyone else doesn’t infringe on your rules of decorum. I don’t want to offend you or your commenters and will adjust my language to your sensibilities as best as I can. I’m just taking the opportunity to let it out knowing that they are probably not reading any of this. We can’t be too cavalier letting the idiots know they’re being played for the benefit of women and minorities, since we’re, y’know, being sneaky.
I’m thinking you’re four years too late. Hillary supporters could really have used that advice.
> hey sanders supporters, you’re woman-hating violent rapist dirtbag emotional terrorists with murder fantasies
> also you ought to be nice, like me
Centrist solidarity, only ever goes one way.
John Morales @ 8:
Pretty sure the advice here is that Bernie supports pay more attention to being kind to others, not that they stop supporting Sanders. Fun that you interpreted in that way.
Are people more likely to hear a message from Sanders, from his website, or from his supporters? Isn’t the whole point of campaigning for a candidate that a group of people has more outreach than a single person? Wouldn’t it therefore make sense that the message that the supporters has more reach and more impact than the message of the candidate?
I don’t get your opposition here. Frustration, I get; you (assuming you are a Bernie supporter) are being accused of being mean and driving away support. It sucks, and you might not even be contributing. But the response here is not to pooh-pooh people’s concerns, the response is to pay attention. That’s all that’s even being asked. Pay attention, and fake some niceties if you have to.
That’s the other part that’s got me stumped about your response. Yeah, the article is asking Bernie supports to be insincere, but, like… insincere about thinking people are worth trying to persuade rather than demean. Pretty low bar to ask for, and hopefully not even something most Bernie supporters would even need to be insincere about.
John, you forget you’re dealing with people here. I don’t have a vote and the outcome of your election only affects me in that the US affects the world, but honestly? I’d be tempted to vote for Biden because so many Sanders supporters are that awful. If I had more skin in the game that might be different (and if I lived in a state that already voted, I would have voted for Warren), but there are Americans who are going to turned off the candidate by his supporters and to pretend otherwise isn’t going to help the cause.
There are voters saying that his supporters are turning them off him and the responses I’ve seen are his supporters turning up the volume and accusing them of hating poor people and wanting them to die.
Ignoring human emotional responses to being screamed at doesn’t make much sense.
@consciousness razor:
Whoops! Someone didn’t understand the message when I said “fuck off forever”. But hey, I’m the forgiving type. Between now and the 2nd week in November, feel free to post non-political comments here on any non political thread, and after that feel free to return to comment on political threads as well.
@Tabby
IIRC, John is from Australia, not the US. Just FYI.
@FoamyWolf:
Don’t even go there with me. People have been making bad choices since the beginning of people making choices. This isn’t about some other situation. This is about this situation.
@John Morales:
First, no. It’s not “as meritorious as any tone argument”. There are many people that think that tone has something to do with truth, and this is obviously not that and is better than that.
How a message is communicated is relevant to political campaigns. It’s not the case that the substance of the message is sufficient and that 100% of voters will respond only to the substance. There is an entire discipline of study where professionals research how people respond to different political messages that differ in packaging rather than content. To deny that tone affects politics and thus elections is to deny empirical evidence.
I mostly eschew tone arguments (especially but not only on the internet, but let’s start with the internet since that’s where we are right now) because I consider the internet a big enough place that there’s room for all kinds, and also because if we automatically exclude angry voices we may free ourselves from the violent reactionaries, but we also lose much of the legitimate calls for action and justice since it’s very difficult to witness injustice and NOT be angry, and lastly because much of tone criticism assumes that the critic knows the motives of the criticized.
But there are contexts where **if** you have a particular aim, **then** crafting a targeted message is advantageous. For all your contempt for “any tone argument”, I doubt you would disagree that if you want a particular job, and you’re being interviewed for that job, then articulating your skills and assets as a list of things about which you are aggrieved your former employer did not better appreciate is less likely to accomplish your goals than articulating those same things as qualities you hope would benefit the organization looking to fill your desired position.
All tone arguments are not created equal, your assertion above notwithstanding.
Separately, about this:
Read the post again. No sincerity is actually advocated. What is advocated is a communication strategy. The writer merely articulated that you don’t have to feel positively disposed to others to speak as if you’re positively disposed to others, but the writer is also clear that she prefers and advocates that one’s feelings match one’s language. She’s just not doing anything to insist on that.
Tolerating insincerity is not advocating it. Consider the comment of A Lurker from Mexico:
ALfM isn’t advocating that we suddenly believe that being misogynist is suddenly okay. ALfM is merely saying that if it helps win an election to have this one conversation be focussed on the policy and not the listener’s misogyny, maybe that’s okay. Wonkette is suggesting the same general idea.
BTW: @A Lurker from Mexico:
Thanks for your lengthy and thoughtful comment.
CD,
“And once you start faking niceness, you might find you like it.”
I think that goes beyond mere diplomacy or tactfulness or civility.
I think that’s an example of humor.
Humour, maybe (a smiley would not have been misplaced), but the intent seems genuine enough to me. Sugar with the medicine.
How is this not shitting on Bernie’s supporters (to whom this is ostensibly addressed), given they’re characterised as nihilistic, exclusivist, murderous emotional terrorists?
I guess Wonkette has its own culture of humorous exaggeration. They engage in the same kind of humor at their own expense, so if you’re familiar with that, you’re less likely to take it as ill-spirited. I, too, engage in quite a bit of self-deprecating humor, so while it may not immediately be apparent that Wonkette should be taken that way, it fits my personality and a pattern of my own postings on this blog. Thus I guess it didn’t occur to me that it would have been misinterpreted.
My bad.
@Crip Dyke
On the contrary, thanks for reading that wall of text I made right there. Wish I got here before John because the conversation took a bit of a confrontational tone up there. I’d like to try, If I may, to play a bit of a conciliatory role.
I think I can explain some of the whys behind the conflict between Sanders supporters and Warren supporters, hoping to maybe mend a little bit of that bridge. If you’d bear with me for another wall of text.
Social interactions are full of ambiguity. On any given conversation with any given person someone will say something that may step on a line without crossing it, or sound kind of strange, make you wonder “was that a jab at me?”. For the most part we let these ambiguities pass, following a sort of Principle of Charity or something. The base assumption is that whoever I’m talking to is not an evil jerk, thinking otherwise can make interacting with others somewhere between “Very Hard” and “Outright Impossible”.
The problem arises when the general conversation gets contaminated by dishonest actors, innuendo, manipulating the framing of the conversation, stuff like that. When someone is just an outright dick, you know it and avoid that one person, your relationships with everyone who’s not that remain unaffected. But when insidious stuff is going on, people get a little more jumpy. Ambiguous situations are no longer regarded as ambiguous, the Principle of Charity is suspended, and for better or worse (mostly worse) you’ll find a lot of false positives that may color interactions in a more hostile way than in needs to be.
The 2016 primary was full of dishonesty, innuendo, and bad faith actors targeted at Bernie Sanders and his supporters. You have pretty much the same picture now in 2020, like Whoopi Goldberg attacking Bernie for making a positive statement about the literacy program and the healthcare services in Castro’s Cuba when she had previously defended Obama for making pretty much the same statements earlier. Media blackouts, voter purges, all that stuff. Some of it was real dishonest attacks, some of it was just ambiguous situations being colored by the dishonest attacks.
Among all that was Elizabeth Warren’s choice not to endorse Bernie during the 2016 primary (I’d put that under “Ambiguous stuff that was judged uncharitably”), her choice to run against him now (same category), her choice to badmouth him and his supporters (bad choice, but understandable in a race) and her choice not to attack Biden (this one I don’t get). All along she didn’t seem aware that she was presenting this ambiguous image in a time and to an audience that is just not very forgiving to such things right now. Clearly, a sizable portion of Bernie supporters assumed the worst, as one does when faced with ambiguity in a climate of insidiousness.
I believe many Warren supporters may even be able to recognize this feelings as their own, not when it comes to Bernie and how his message is treated, but about other things, like misogyny, for example. Women candidates get unfairly criticized for things that their male peers are given a pass on (more like women in general TBH), women have to work harder, face greater danger when doing something as simple as getting out of the house, they have to jump through hoops and face endless arbitrary demands of how to look, how to speak, how to live their lives, it’s a lot. And with this feeling of being besieged on all sides you might not look so kindly on ambiguous statements and situations. “This guy has a problem with Warren, is it genuine or is he a sexist?”
It’s not crazy to wonder that. It’s not necessarily wrong. It does give a more hostile tint to conversations that run into that particular ditch. It’s not the fault of the woman wondering if the guy is a sexist, the fault is mainly on the environment of sexism that makes said wondering necessary in the first place and slightly on the guy for not having awareness of that environment (assuming he’s not a sexist, just really bad at expressing himself clearly).
Crucially, the fenomena that drives this post and most of the comment thread so far: “Your behavior and what people think of you as a supporter, reflects on the image of your candidate” also works on reverse, and many in the Sanders camp seem to have (mistakenly) projected the feelings of ambiguity, alarm and betrayal that they have about Warren onto her supporters.
I think this would be a good time to heal, maybe have more awareness of each others feelings. Sure, there are traitors and liars twisting the conversations to their own benefit. But they are not here. They are not voters in the ranks, the traitors and liars are the ones with six-figure paychecks, they may spread some lies online but it’s mostly on TV because that’s where they are. I think that Warren supporters and Sanders supporters should be able to see eye to eye on a lot of things. Both have a lot in common, in values, priorities. Now that I think about it, both camps have been hurt in similar ways before. Both have been neglected, abused, gaslit. Perhaps the exact circumstances of how you all got hurt are not the same, but the wounds look very similar to me. If you ask me, both groups seem uniquely qualified to heal each other and support each other and make sure that you come together to stop Biden because that guy is an idiot and he’s gonna bomb worse than Hillary, please I’m begging you, we just got something decent going on here with AMLO and either Biden or Trump is gonna torpedo it, lesser of two evils fucks me over either way, I don’t have a vote but I live the consequences, right now Bernie is the only choice were things actually get better for you, for me, for the world, you can stop the trolley before the juncture, no one needs to be run over.
@ ^ & 17 John Morales : I think it is noting that some are – not all – and those that are are hurting the cause they want to support. If you want Sanders to do better then reaching out and being kind and nice in order to bring others onboard and encourage them to join and help you rather than driving them away with attacks that are likely indeed almost certain to backfire is the way to go isn’t it?
Huh? I guess it depends where you see the emphasis there. I would put the empahasis on the niceness rather than the faking part. IOW the “you”” here find you prefer being nice when you try it rather than “you” prefer faking and being insincere about things. You become what you try to be in effect. Yes, it doesn’t reflect well on – again some – Sanders suporters that they have so far being enjoying not being nice. I don’t see why that simple bit of advice is “beyond mere diplomacy /tactfullness / civility” instead of reflecting and advising the approach of being tactful, diplomatic and civil.
Incidentally, civility / tactfullness does have its limits and there are times where it isn’t appropriate.
However there also are contexts and situations where being tactful and diplomatic is the best path to suceed in what you want to do and encouraging more people to vote for your political candidate seems to me to be fall into the latter category. For not co-incidental example : you want to encourage other members of the Democratic party, say, Warren supporters, to, say, support Bernie Sanders then showing them that you are willing to be good to them and empathise with them seems more likely to suceed than, say, gloating about her failure and attacking her and them as whatever bad things.
FWIW. Aussie typing here and someone who much prefers Bernie Sanders although I also have my reservations about him mainly health and age. (Yes those reservations apply more to Biden too.) But Biden – though far from my favourite Democratic contender – is still light years ahead of Trump and I think it is vital for the world that Trump is removed ASAP. Personally, Kamala Harris was my first choice out of the original Democratic party field.* Then Warren then Sanders. Out of that mammoth 20+ original Democratic party field, Biden would be my second last choice ahead only of Bloomberg. But still well and truly a huge improvement over Trump..
I really liked Elizabeth Warren and thought she was the better progressive option because she’s younger, I think sharper and has arguably less baggage and, again, arguably the stronger of the progressive candidates. I’d have much preferred Bernie to support her and be her advisor instead of running himself and help her win but that’s not how its turned out. Progressives in the States have backed Bernie and now its time we all consolidated behind him just as the moderates have behind Biden – who I’d also not rate as the best moderate candidate.
If the Democratic side is still divided, bickering and fighting itself rather than unifying and whole-heartedly supporting and working together for whoever the Democratic nominee is, well, we’ve got no chance and the consequences of another Trump term are horrific to contemplate. For the whole globe not just the US of A. So please, back and work for Sanders now and, if we have to, equally for Biden later. But that fight’s not decided yet and things could stil lchange so that Bernie is the nominee. Its along rtoad still and time. If you are backing Bernie, be good about it and think about what willbest help him suceed. Including, yes, tone and appraoch strategy.
* Becuase, petty a s it seems the thought of the reichwing heads assploding had an Aferican-Amercian young woman been the successor to Trump and the one to undo the damage of his term.
D’oh! My post was at #19 & #17. John Morales. I ddin’t expect to be ninja’sd by a couple more posts incl. Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden addressing it much better than I did.
CD @20, fair enough. Thanks for that.
—
StevoR, I have scrapped the detailed response I made to your comment, in the spirit of niceness.
@ 21. A Lurker from Mexico : Well writ and seconded.
I don’t think Biden is as bad as you seem to think – sure hope not – although I would rather see Sanders as the D-Nominee & POTUS than him by avery long way I’d also much rather Biden than Trump also by a very long way.