The right only debates with itself: their view and their version of the left. Fighting with that is near impossible
The right only debates with itself: their view and their version of the left. Fighting with that is near impossible
www.salon.com
For context it helps for you to read the whole article, but here are some snippets:
Not long after the attacks of September 11, 2001, my mom accused me of hating my country. By then she had fully fallen into the Fox News world, having married a far-right man late in life. But her position still surprised me. I was, after all, her own daughter. Didn't she have a basic idea of what I thought?
I explained that being against the war in Iraq, opposed to invading Afghanistan and all-out critical of just about everything the Bush administration did was not akin to hating my country. We went around in circles. But there was no convincing her that she held the wrong premise and that critique was not hatred.
That wasn't the only time in those years that I dealt with being told that I hated my country, but it certainly was the most frustrating. Again and again, then as now, those of us who make critical arguments about the United States, those of us who question conservative policies, those of us who point out examples of right-wing hypocrisies, aggressions, abuses and lies find ourselves in the strange position of having to argue against a warped understanding of what we advocate.
I don't think I fully captured the core of the problem until I recently read an essay in The Atlantic by Ibram X. Kendi on how
there is no debate over critical race theory. As Kendi puts it:
Professors are trying to brainwash students to become socialists, feminists think all men are rapists, abortion rights defenders don't care about life, the gay community doesn't respect marriage, and so on. We can even see it in claims that young people are snowflake whiners.
They distort from the start and then take up all of your bandwidth in fighting their distortion. They don't just set the terms; they singlehandedly define them — for both sides.
It isn't just that the right argues with itself. It is also that they do it really loudly.
Take, for example, the
recent scare over President Joe Biden's door-to-door vaccine strategy. The White House has noted that there is a growing disparity in communities receiving the vaccine. So, Biden proposes the notion that in some communities it might be beneficial to go door-to-door to spread information about vaccine safety and efficacy in order to encourage more people to get vaccinated.
Yet, that's not what the GOP hears. Instead they turn this plan into a sinister strategy,
which according to GOP Rep. Madison Cawthorn (N.C.), could be used to take all manner of items away from citizens: "They could then go door to door and take your guns. They could go door to door and take your Bibles."
You can't debate with someone who isn't even listening to your point.
This, of course, is why irony and satire do a better job of diving into the fray than reasoned critical discourse. Satire can take the absurdity of these right-wing faux debates and expose their spectacle.
www.politico.com
