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Fanaticism and political movements
Squidget0
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
In the 90s, something happened to the conservative movement.
Anyone who has been following US politics in the last 20 years knows what I mean. At some point, the conservative movement began to scorn compromise. They saw working with the opposition as a sign of weakness, and saw anyone who disagreed with them not as someone to work alongside, but as an enemy who should be silenced or have their legitimacy challenged. Voters and politicans alike retreated into information bubbles and cut out of their lives any who disagreed with the orthodoxy. Conservative politicans became the subject of purity tests, wherein they were increasingly required to prove that they showed no opinion that wasn't in line with the core ideals of conservatism.
This did not happen all at once. Its been a gradual process, one propaganda story at a time, one tax pledge at a time. The scorched earth politics of Newt Gingrinch may have kicked it off, but no one person or institution is to blame. What is clear is that there has been a shift, not just in policy, but in the way the conservative movement approaches problems. It scorns compromise and dismisses the legitimacy of any who disagree with them. It approaches dissidents as enemies who must be silenced or punished, and sees facts and new information to be only as valuable as their contribution to the conservative cause. To paraphrase Rush Limbaugh, Conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed.
And this change has hurt everyone. Liberals and conservatives alike rightward are less satisfied with their party and their politics than they were 20 years ago. Fewer bills are passed, less can get done, and obstructionism and inflammatory rhetoric are the norm. The fanaticism of the conservative movement hasn't just made things worse for liberals, it's made things worse for all of us, even the fanatics. Government satisfaction has dropped steadily with the inability of government to get things done, and while that's useful in the short-term as a political strategy for the right, it's a terrible way to get anything done.
In the context of this thread, I would characterize fanaticism in the following ways. Obviously no movement will universally display these things in every case, but the more influential these beliefs are the more fanatical a movement is.
1. Absolute Certainty - Fanaticism, by nature, leaves no room for doubt or questioning. Fanatics within a movement cannot be questioned. Anyone who questions any aspect of the movement is an apologist, and should be treated as dissidents if they do not immediately repent.
2. Approach to Dissidents - The opinions of those who disagree are not valuable. Ideally, those who state their disagreement should be silenced, or otherwise punished, until they are willing to either silence themselves or apologize and repent. Especially important is that "Pure" members of the movement should minimize interaction and information-sharing with those outside the movement, so that the (obviously wrong) ideas of the enemy not be allowed to spread and gain more power in society.
3. Approach to Facts - Facts are useful only inasmuch as they support the movement. Ideally, facts should always be framed in such a way as to support the movement, and those facts that cannot be framed in this way should not be brought up. Adherance to the movement is more important than facts, and no new information can ever be allowed to change the movement's core ideals.
Conservatives, of course, are not the only movement to ever show this kind of fanaticism. We've seen it time and time again throughout history. We've burned the witches, silenced the socialists, blacklisted the commies, ostracized and shamed the sexual deviants - and it seems like almost every time we've gone this route, all we accomplish is making everyone's lives a lot worse. Yet time and time again, we're confronted with this same set of ideas, as if we just didn't attack the right people, or we just weren't fanatical enough. You see this idea running through our mythology - look at Batman or any other vigilante, where it turns out that all of the problems of crime and drugs and mental illness can be solved by just punching them really hard. The idea is always that these bad guys are so bad that they don't GET a trial, as if the only thing we need to get rid of evil is to suspend all of those pesky systems and morals that get in our way. If you suggest that maybe the method is flawed you're weak, soft, an apologist for all the evil in the world.
In US politics I worry because I see the same ideas taking hold on the left, particularly across a lot of social movements. I see groups of people who are absolutely certain of their righteousness, who fully believe that dissidents should be silenced. This person should be shunned. This person should be fired. Shut up shut up shut up. I'm not so concerned about any particular case or victim as about what it represents, the growing fanaticism on the left. A fanatic will tell you that their methods, and only their methods, can end evil in the world, but they're wrong. Fanaticism doesn't change anyone's mind, all it does is isolate, and sooner or later you'll be the one who ends up isolated by it.
On this forum, its become common. I can't count how many times I've seen an exchange on this forum where someone says "My conservative friend said [conservative talking point]..." and the immediate and universal response among many posters is "You should cut him/her out of your life." As if ostracizing is the obvious answer for a political disagreement. Doesn't cutting off the people we disagree with just make everyone's world that much smaller? The idea seems to be that if enough people ostracize all of the people with "bad" opinions you'll eventually kill the bad opinions, but in reality you haven't killed anything. The opinion is still there, you're just choosing to ignore it. It's taking the easy way out, and cloaking yourself in a shield of righteousness while doing so.
I'm increasingly coming to believe that this kind of fanaticism within a movement is more dangerous than any particular political ideology. It's the mindset that anyone who disagrees with you is an enemy, and that any method you use against them is acceptable. It extinguishes the space for people to think, to change their minds, to entertain doubt or to listen to others. The ability to work alongside those with whom we have a deep political disagreement is not a minor issue in a liberal society. I'm not afraid of Brandon Eich or Paula Deen or Cliven Bundy - they're individuals on the wrong side of history. I am afraid of political ideals I believe in becoming dominated by fanatics, of seeing the political movements I believe in become more fanatical. I'm a liberal, and part of that is believing that a lasting society won't be built on "You're either with us or against us", but on "We're all in this together."
So this thread is for discussing political fanaticism. Do you agree with my characterization of it? Do you see it is an issue? Obviously I've mostly discussed US politics here, but fanaticism in other movements (historical or modern) is welcome. I don't think this is an issue you can legislate away, but it's one that I feel is worth discussing all the same.
Anyone who has been following US politics in the last 20 years knows what I mean. At some point, the conservative movement began to scorn compromise. They saw working with the opposition as a sign of weakness, and saw anyone who disagreed with them not as someone to work alongside, but as an enemy who should be silenced or have their legitimacy challenged. Voters and politicans alike retreated into information bubbles and cut out of their lives any who disagreed with the orthodoxy. Conservative politicans became the subject of purity tests, wherein they were increasingly required to prove that they showed no opinion that wasn't in line with the core ideals of conservatism.
This did not happen all at once. Its been a gradual process, one propaganda story at a time, one tax pledge at a time. The scorched earth politics of Newt Gingrinch may have kicked it off, but no one person or institution is to blame. What is clear is that there has been a shift, not just in policy, but in the way the conservative movement approaches problems. It scorns compromise and dismisses the legitimacy of any who disagree with them. It approaches dissidents as enemies who must be silenced or punished, and sees facts and new information to be only as valuable as their contribution to the conservative cause. To paraphrase Rush Limbaugh, Conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed.
And this change has hurt everyone. Liberals and conservatives alike rightward are less satisfied with their party and their politics than they were 20 years ago. Fewer bills are passed, less can get done, and obstructionism and inflammatory rhetoric are the norm. The fanaticism of the conservative movement hasn't just made things worse for liberals, it's made things worse for all of us, even the fanatics. Government satisfaction has dropped steadily with the inability of government to get things done, and while that's useful in the short-term as a political strategy for the right, it's a terrible way to get anything done.
In the context of this thread, I would characterize fanaticism in the following ways. Obviously no movement will universally display these things in every case, but the more influential these beliefs are the more fanatical a movement is.
1. Absolute Certainty - Fanaticism, by nature, leaves no room for doubt or questioning. Fanatics within a movement cannot be questioned. Anyone who questions any aspect of the movement is an apologist, and should be treated as dissidents if they do not immediately repent.
2. Approach to Dissidents - The opinions of those who disagree are not valuable. Ideally, those who state their disagreement should be silenced, or otherwise punished, until they are willing to either silence themselves or apologize and repent. Especially important is that "Pure" members of the movement should minimize interaction and information-sharing with those outside the movement, so that the (obviously wrong) ideas of the enemy not be allowed to spread and gain more power in society.
3. Approach to Facts - Facts are useful only inasmuch as they support the movement. Ideally, facts should always be framed in such a way as to support the movement, and those facts that cannot be framed in this way should not be brought up. Adherance to the movement is more important than facts, and no new information can ever be allowed to change the movement's core ideals.
Conservatives, of course, are not the only movement to ever show this kind of fanaticism. We've seen it time and time again throughout history. We've burned the witches, silenced the socialists, blacklisted the commies, ostracized and shamed the sexual deviants - and it seems like almost every time we've gone this route, all we accomplish is making everyone's lives a lot worse. Yet time and time again, we're confronted with this same set of ideas, as if we just didn't attack the right people, or we just weren't fanatical enough. You see this idea running through our mythology - look at Batman or any other vigilante, where it turns out that all of the problems of crime and drugs and mental illness can be solved by just punching them really hard. The idea is always that these bad guys are so bad that they don't GET a trial, as if the only thing we need to get rid of evil is to suspend all of those pesky systems and morals that get in our way. If you suggest that maybe the method is flawed you're weak, soft, an apologist for all the evil in the world.
In US politics I worry because I see the same ideas taking hold on the left, particularly across a lot of social movements. I see groups of people who are absolutely certain of their righteousness, who fully believe that dissidents should be silenced. This person should be shunned. This person should be fired. Shut up shut up shut up. I'm not so concerned about any particular case or victim as about what it represents, the growing fanaticism on the left. A fanatic will tell you that their methods, and only their methods, can end evil in the world, but they're wrong. Fanaticism doesn't change anyone's mind, all it does is isolate, and sooner or later you'll be the one who ends up isolated by it.
On this forum, its become common. I can't count how many times I've seen an exchange on this forum where someone says "My conservative friend said [conservative talking point]..." and the immediate and universal response among many posters is "You should cut him/her out of your life." As if ostracizing is the obvious answer for a political disagreement. Doesn't cutting off the people we disagree with just make everyone's world that much smaller? The idea seems to be that if enough people ostracize all of the people with "bad" opinions you'll eventually kill the bad opinions, but in reality you haven't killed anything. The opinion is still there, you're just choosing to ignore it. It's taking the easy way out, and cloaking yourself in a shield of righteousness while doing so.
I'm increasingly coming to believe that this kind of fanaticism within a movement is more dangerous than any particular political ideology. It's the mindset that anyone who disagrees with you is an enemy, and that any method you use against them is acceptable. It extinguishes the space for people to think, to change their minds, to entertain doubt or to listen to others. The ability to work alongside those with whom we have a deep political disagreement is not a minor issue in a liberal society. I'm not afraid of Brandon Eich or Paula Deen or Cliven Bundy - they're individuals on the wrong side of history. I am afraid of political ideals I believe in becoming dominated by fanatics, of seeing the political movements I believe in become more fanatical. I'm a liberal, and part of that is believing that a lasting society won't be built on "You're either with us or against us", but on "We're all in this together."
So this thread is for discussing political fanaticism. Do you agree with my characterization of it? Do you see it is an issue? Obviously I've mostly discussed US politics here, but fanaticism in other movements (historical or modern) is welcome. I don't think this is an issue you can legislate away, but it's one that I feel is worth discussing all the same.
Squidget0 on
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EDIT: Also, the surrendering of the traditional media to this atmosphere, so that at best they'll say "conservatives say ____, liberals say not _____. You decide." And at worst, they'll just side with the right to avoid being criticized as liberally biased.
And your characterization of liberals is... poor. I'm considered far left and I'm basically for Eisenhower + racial/gender/LGBT equality. Some additional environmental safeguards too, but nothing ridiculous. What absolutism there is on the left comes from:
1) The right being completely fucking ridiculous
2) Having things keep turning out exactly how we keep saying they will and nobody ever actually learning. Being Cassandra is super frustrating.
3) People's humanity being denied. We don't like that much.
Not prominent ones.
Canada's mainstream conservatism supports free health care, free education and the social safety net.
The US doesn't have any representation for liberals. Your Democratic party is to the right of our conservatives.
Doesn't Harper not support several of those things?
I can't agree that "both sides" are bad here. The right has been steadfast in their unwillingness to compromise. The left has been forced to compromise on key ideals constantly.
One of the loudest complaints that we have on this forum is that the politicians on the left don't have the balls to just push things through and call Republicans' bluffs.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
Lazy cynicism about politics also assists in absolutism. If you draw a false equivalence between the two parties on these kinds of issues, it becomes easy for either group to become more and more fanatical because they're not suffering for it.
You'll likely find a lot of people in the Conservative party of Canada that would like to dismantle those things, but if they tried it, they'd be crucified. Public Health Care enjoys over 90% support from Canadians. 86% want nothing to do with two tiered health care and say that the problems facing our health care system need to be solved by public, not private, solutions.
The thing is, the CPC was made from an amalgamation of both the mainstream Progressive Conservatives (The Tories, as they were known) and the lunatic Reform party. Much like the Republicans, the inmates are running the asylum in Canadian conservative politics, but even so they know that Public Health Care, Public Schools and Welfare are things that almost everybody in this country support. Particularly the health care. So they leave it alone.
Hell, when one CPC MP tried to bring up restrictions on abortion, it was a massive deal and a major black mark on the CPC.
EDIT: And they can't touch gay marriage. That's a done deal. The donest.
The people on the left his description reminds me the most of would be your single issue types, where theyre generically/vaguely liberal but heaven forbid you happen to offend their one particular sensibility.
A handful make their voices heard in any given debate, but when you're not talking about free trade coffee anymore they're much less vocal and its someone else ready to declare war on Japan in order to save the dolphins.
The big difference is that with the tightening of the conservative orthodoxy its the same people, screaming the same thing on every issue.
Come Overwatch with meeeee
So if I'm reading this right, I'm right that Harper does not support those things, but you'd consider him not a mainstream conservative? And obviously with those numbers, that makes sense.
Nope.
Not on a national scale.
http://billmoyers.com/2013/10/10/the-radicalization-of-the-gop-is-the-most-important-political-story-today/
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Studies by Pew and CNN show that popular approval for the Republican Party is at an all-time low.
http://www.people-press.org/2013/02/26/gop-seen-as-principled-but-out-of-touch-and-too-extreme/
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/12/20/cnn-poll-are-gop-policies-too-extreme/
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Like, right now they're trying to pass legislation to remove Elections Canada's ability to investigate electoral fraud (Which is huge, because the Conservative Party was caught telling Liberal party and NDP votes that their voting stations had been changed, even though they hadn't), and also to forbid them from encouraging people to vote.
So we have our own issues with the right dismantling the democratic process, but I'm not saying your conservatives are worse and ours are better, I'm saying that the US has no equivalent representation of parties like the Liberal Party of Canada, or the New Democratic Party, which are center-left and left wing respectively.
Nixon's southern strategy pulled wingnut racists together with wingnut small government conservatives. Prior to the period between 1964 and 1974, Republicans and Democrats didn't align quite as clearly along liberal-conservative lines as they do today.
Rove's evangelical strategy brought into the Republican party a group of wingnuts who explicitly care more about religion and superstition than they do about facts and evidence.
Decades of gerrymandering have given minority viewpoints more and more seats in the House, including those of wingnuts.
Citizens United has allowed more and more money to be filtered to the useful idiots in the nutwing who happen to support policies - like lower taxes - that also coincidentally benefit the very rich.
The House appropriation committee's ban on earmarks has eliminated one of the major ways that the two parties could bargain with each other and find compromise.
Talk radio, cable TV, and the Internet give the nutwing more avenues to communicate and organize.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The difference is that (a) in the US, the leftwing fanatics are nowhere near political power, while right wing fanatics are sitting right there in the Establishment at various levels, and globally (b) conservatism is innately intolerant of difference and change.
Conservatism means something. I don't even think it's necessary or important to put it into a dualistic view of politics. In and of itself, conservatism is an irrational and intolerant political movement.
That's more or less correct.
Harper being Prime Minister is sort of an odd artefact of the way the political system here works:
Harper is just a member of the party, with his own seat & riding (a backwater seat in Calgary, which is the largest city in Alberta, but absolutely miniscule and ass-backwards compared to a major metro area like, say, Vancouver, Montreal or Toronto). Since each party picks their own leadership and Canadians mostly just vote for a party (you vote for who will be your local representative, not for who will be the Prime Minister), you can get people like Harper in charge - whom would lose catastrophically in a general election but wins in landslide victories in his own little backwater district.
It's a weird system (and only gets weirder when you consider that the buck ultimately still stops at the House of Windsor).
As to the OP:
I don't really agree that contemporary Conservative politics in the U.S. are exceptionally fanatical. I mean, look at 1930s German politics, or 1920s Spain politics, etc.
I also don't really agree with the 'both sides' rhetoric. I mean, where is the socialist equivalent to Rush Limbaugh, for example? Where is the socialist equivalent to Fox News? I don't just mean a network or personality that always defends the Democratic party, like Rachel Maddow, but an organization / person whom is just as mean-spirited, just as racist & just as waist deep into supernatural ideology.
Such a person / organization championing socialist causes does not exist in the United States, in my opinion. In fact, the only two socialists that are at all prominent in U.S. politics are Bernie Sanders & Paul Krugman (there are, of course, organizations like Democracy Now! and people like Amy Goodman / Noam Chomsky, but these are hardly 'prominent' or well funded).
You also have to look at compromise and debate more carefully. For example, I will never change in my feelings that gay and straight people should be treated the same by the state. It's not up for debate, because the debate is based on the idea that possibly they are less human than me. And the debate points have been out in the public sphere forever. So a 'debate' on the topic is with an informed anti gay advocate is basically pointless. I'm not going to change my mind, and if they haven't yet done so, they won't either... unless they are young, cut off from society, or in some other way sheltered from these ideas. So sometimes I will sensitively and politely debate the issue. And sometimes I will get mad instead. Depends on the situation.
Equally I don't believe in religion, I'm not likely to compromise on the facts of the case, but I believe in a syncretic heterogenous society, so I want there to be freedom of religion. I compromise with religious people in my friends and family because I don't want to hurt them. I compromise my speech and behaviour but not my principles.
I've never understood bipartisanship, as it is presented in the US. It seems like a mechanism for extracting value from a broken two-party oligarchy. Not a concept of much real value.
And yet, in the last decade, 1/3rd of the country has changed their mind on gay marriage. The idea that no one on the other side of the debate will ever change their mind and so it's not worth talking to them is demonstratably false. You could have said "All of the people who are going to change their mind already have done so" a decade ago on gay rights, and you'd have had just as much evidence for it as you do now. But it wasn't the case.
Again, this seems to me like just another flavor of fanaticism, the idea that the other side are monsters and so there's no point in talking to them or exchanging ideas. Yet time and time again, history proves that wrong. Talking to people, addressing them as equals, and having conversations - these things change people's minds. You don't win by making all of the people you think are wrong shut up, you win by convincing them and addressing their concerns within your own moral framework.
Tax revolts started in the late 1970s, around the time white flight and urban decay were starting to become obvious. The formation of new municipalities at the edges of towns had started in the 1950s, though - this was a staggered phenomenon.
What importance would you place upon the Fairness Doctrine in the timeline?
People do change their minds, but they usually do it on their own time, not because you brought some awesome and compelling argument to the table.
This report from Third Way seems to suggest otherwise. Generational changes are certainly a factor too, but the biggest impact has come from people of all generations simply changing their minds. See that graph I posted above for that too - the gap is widest in millenials, but every generation has come around on this issue, and that's been the biggest source of the shift.
I think it would be prudent for a study to be conducted looking at how the newer generations are able to affect the opinions of the older generations. Because I feel like that would be the source of the shift a kind of familial peer pressure from people's children and grandchildren helping to gently turn opinions
Want to play co-op games? Feel free to hit me up!
You didn't read all of my post. Or I didn't explain myself well. I said that debate was worthwhile when people are particularly uninformed, and I think gay marriage has definitely been an area where many Americans have been radically uninformed by people in the media and church. Who would, I think, be some of the informed anti gay advocates I referred to.
We don't really know the mechanism by which people changed their minds on gay marriage in the USA, though. We can posit it was polite debate, but I don't know how you could prove that.
Edit: I read your link, and I can see a lot of flaws in its assumptions. Just because political advocates changed tactics does not mean that the previous tactics were valueless. And people's own internal narrative of their own changes in belief are often tremendously flawed. For example, I think there are a lot of conformist people who simply started supporting gay marriage once it became a common idea around them.
Let's be fair, here. The first major city in North America to elect a Muslim mayor is not ass-backwards. Calgary is 1 million people, very metropolitan and very tolerant.
HOWEVER.
Alberta has this massive long term obsession with the specter of the NEP, a policy that Albertans (Who were there are the time) blame the oil recession of the 80s on. It's ridiculous, the recession was worldwide, but politics tends to not be very rational.
It affects political affiliation more than any kind of individual policy. People in Alberta vote for parties that identify themselves as conservative because so very many of them think that any non-conservative party is about to bleed the province dry.
Fanaticism in single issues is hardly rare. This is a video game forum, surely one has observed a console argument or a Mac vs PC argument before, and they certainly exhibit all three of Squidget0's complaints. The interesting part is the alignment of apparently unrelated issues along the identical, and very angry, lines.
Generational changes are about more than replacement - they're about a new demographic impacting the sphere of public opinion.
Is Old Man Johnson down the street going to give two shits about a lucid argument in favor of homosexuality or transgender issues from a liberal arts graduate? No. Is Old Man Johnson going to adjust his opinion as new family members / neighbors start embracing homosexuality / transgender people, and as said people begin to populate his neighborhood? Yes (well, that or he's going to completely turn inward, grab his gun and go down to the Bundy ranch to talk about how Obama has turned everyone into gay muslims. But for the most part, we'll assume that Old Man Johnson is a reasonable person).
Argument isn't what wins the day - a change in demographics / environment is.
That just seems like a verbal trick though, because "change in demographics" still has to start at convincing people. Millenials didn't just pop out of the womb more tolerant and accepting of homosexuality. As far as we know, homosexuality isn't any more common today than it was 50 years ago. At some point, the gay rights people still had to convince others that they were right.
As for "We can't know what the real cause was", a lot of research is done into this by advocacy groups. The Slate article I linked above has some details about exactly which arguments worked for advocacy groups, and which ones didn't work. They track that stuff very closely.
Seriously, without escaping into the world of speculation & statistics: how often have you ever, and I mean ever, been in an argument with someone and convinced them that their dearly held political / ideological opinions should change?
Even on an incredibly easy topic - say like vaccination vs anti-vaccination, or evolution vs creationism, or airplanes crashing into the WTC towers vs explosive implosion - have you even once amanged to convince someone that, no, they are wrong and your arguments are right?
Because I sure haven't, ever, and it wasn't for lack of trying.
It's possible! But yeah, the xkcd strip is famous for a reason.
But that doesn't change my opinions on who you bother debating. And how useful the confrontational demonstrations have been, on this and other issues.
Go to infowars.com, or abovetopsecret.com, or stormfront.com, or answersingenesis.com, or momsagainstmercury.org and spend your time evangelizing facts (well, until you get banned, anyway). See how many people you win over.
- facts don't change minds
- Depends on the person.
Well, obviously it's never as simple as that. People tend to change their opinions gradually over time, based on a lot of different interactions, not just one. Having a discussion with someone might not completely change them around to your point of view, but it might give them something to think about, or they might come back to it later when some other event leads them to re-consider their opinions.
No, you won't usually cause someone to do a 180 on a topic through a simple discussion, unless they're extremely uninformed. But that's like saying "I exercised one time and didn't lose any weight, clearly exercise is worthless!" The repetition and consistency is what matters.
And, okay, fine, let's revise that to: facts should not be expected to change minds, on average; indeed on average you should expect a hardening of pre-existing views, regardless of whether the information so presented militates or favours the pre-existing view.
So people are less inclined to listen to dissenting opinions and learn because the dissenting opinion usually comes from one of them there arrogant college educated elitists
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