(Author’s note: I’m begging you to read this entire piece before getting angry at me. If you’d prefer not to commit to that, I ask you to please just not read it.)
As far as I can tell, everyone agrees that Facebook is awful. I’ve never seen anyone praise or defend Facebook. This consensus exists, despite the vast hordes of people who are on Facebook every day. I’m speaking anecdotally, but I have just looked up the statistics, and let’s just say that you probably know more people who aren’t on Facebook than you know people who have been struck by lightning, but it’s not a blowout.
This reminds me of the period in the late 70s/early 80s when I couldn’t find anyone who would admit to having been a Bee Gees fan. This despite the Saturday NightFever album having gone 16x platinum, a sales figure so high there isn’t even a name for it.
For my part, I see Facebook as a wonderful and convenient resource, when I want to reconnect with people I haven’t seen for a while so they can get pissed off at me.
We’re living now in a terrible, frightening moment in American history. Possibly there are conservatives who don’t see it that way; it’s not clear to me whether any conservatives would agree with this statement. I’ve read in the fake newspaper The Washington Post that conservatives around the country are angry, and the soulless middlemen who keep track of this sort of thing and advise politicians on the correct way to cynically manipulate voters are telling their bosses to play to the anger. (I just realized the sexist nature of what I just wrote; my apologies. There must, of course, be soulless middlewomen as well, and I hereby acknowledge them.)
I posted on Facebook about what I’d read, and included a quote from the article from a white guy who’d voted for Obama, and then voted for Trump. He explained that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had made him feel attacked and accused. He said that every time he’d turned on the TV, he saw some Democrat accusing him of being a racist, so he moved over to the other side.
I posted this on a morning before a busy day. I was in the studio or something, I forget, but the point is that I couldn’t check Facebook again for ten hours or so.
When I finally came back, my post had about 128 comments. (To put this in perspective, if I post about a show, I get 12 comments, 8 of which are people explaining why they can’t make it to the show.)
There was a comment early on from one of the three conservatives who read my posts. He objected to the characterization of Republicans as angry, feeling that this was an unfair slam. The article was full of quotes from Republican political operatives who had drawn this conclusion, but since this was Facebook, the commenter naturally just assumed the statement he didn’t like was wrong and dismissed it.
Most of the comments were liberals attacking the dumb white guy who had voted for Trump. They correctly identified all of the many ways in which his logic was flawed. Americans are excellent at identifying flawed logic in others, I find.
My feeling, reading the article, was that there were probably a lot of guys like this out there, and that they were probably going to vote for Trump again. It’s not surprising that I felt this after reading the article, because I’d already felt it before picking up the paper. This means that my reaction to the article was an example of confirmation bias, by the way. This is a phenomenon where you sort through the endless chatter from media and people you know and pick out the information that confirms what you already feel, and then you congratulate yourself for having arrived at your conclusion through intellect. It’s like when my brother and I used to reach all the way down to the bottom of a cereal box to find the “prize,” which was some plastic trinket that we didn’t realize was fucking up the environment, because we were kids in the 70s, and that we also didn’t realize was probably made in some third world sweatshop, because of our white privilege.
I had, in fact, posted this thumbnail sketch of the article in an attempt to support my guess that this sort of immediate and uncontrollable angry reaction to the Trump voter attempting to explain himself is part of our problem. Liberals are often criticizing conservatives for their lack of empathy for people who they perceive as different from themselves. I do this myself, at least in my mind. I don’t do it out loud, generally, because I don’t believe that the satisfaction I’ll get from publicly criticizing others will be helpful to the left wing cause, while I do believe that my act will almost certainly be heard by conservatives within earshot as more evidence that liberals are assholes, and that this is a good reason to never, ever, listen to what they say. I don’t, by the way, believe that keeping my mouth shut will result in the conservatives learning from me, or that talking to them calmly will fix everything.
I could continue in this vein, explaining at length all the things I’m not saying, but I’m not going to do that. In part, I don’t want to do it because it shouldn’t be necessary for me to add a lot of redundant blather in order to inoculate myself against the angry response I anticipate from liberals who can smell a disagreement from a leftist miles away.
I’m tired of doing that when I write. If I make my point briefly, it’s misunderstood. I get an immediate and unequivocal reaction laying out all the heinous things I did not say, and attacking them.
If I make my point at length, taking every opportunity to clarify what I’m NOT saying, and throwing liberals a bone for being good people, and making sure they know that I’m on their side, then people will say my post is really long and they don’t have time to read it. And my gambit won’t work even with those who do read it, because they will still conclude that I’m a fifth columnist, an enabler of racists, and so forth.
On Facebook, if you suggest that white conservatives are humans who should be listened to even if you don’t agree with them, or even if they are dead wrong, you can count on a bunch of angry responses and accusations. (I saw the other day that some people have moved past the “you should always punch Nazis and racists” idea to “you should always punch Republicans.” If I’d suggested a while back that the punching Nazis idea would lead to this, I don’t think I’d have been taken seriously. But it has, apparently.) If you’re a white, straight, male, there’s a good chance you’ll eventually be told to shut the fuck up, because the world is changing, and in the new world people that aren’t you will be doing the talking.
(Incidentally, despite my frustration with this, my sympathies do lie with the ethnic minorities and other maligned groups who’ve felt powerless and voiceless for so long. It’s not going to kill me to let them have the floor for a while, and I’ve already learned a lot from them. I expect to learn more as they continue to speak. I hope, though, that they will learn something too, that many white straight males have never learned— that people who control the conversation and shut down dissent may not realize when they themselves are wrong about something. That’s the curse of controlling the conversation.)
I’m tempted to say a few words about my idea of civility, but I won’t, because even here, away from Facebook, I no longer feel comfortable using that word. If I can step away from those debates for a moment, and I’m hoping you’ll follow me, I’d like to explain what really upsets me about that particular topic.
It’s not so much that I think I’m right while the most vocal and engaged liberals are wrong. I don’t, in fact, think that. I’m not, by nature, a “double-downer,” at least not over the long haul. My views about many things far from politics tend to be outliers, even controversial, and I’ve spent decades figuring out how to reconcile my feelings and opinions with the weight of disagreement that surrounds me. Although in my youth I was inclined to write off those who disagreed with me, I don’t find comfort in that these days, and I’ve put a lot of energy into trying to see the world through other eyes.
This has helped my writing, I believe. By which I mean my songwriting, where I often try to get inside the mind of a character who is different from me.
My attempts to empathize with conservatives haven’t won over many conservatives, because (I suspect) they want me to go in with them 100%. I can’t do that, but I do refrain from shaming them. This may achieve nothing, for all I know. Liberal friends of mine have suggested this.
Now I’m attempting to see the world through the eyes of liberals. I didn’t do this initially, because I expect more from liberals than I do from conservatives. Despite everything I’ve read about social science, I agree with liberals that they are smarter and more educated than conservatives, and more capable of both empathy and critical thinking.
What I’ve come to realize, though, is that people don’t go on Facebook for an opportunity to showcase their empathy and critical thinking skills. Just as we choose media voices that reinforce what we already believe, we go to Facebook to read the posts of people who agree with us. When a Facebook friend says something we disagree with, some of us consider the person’s argument, carefully trying to assess whether the points that trigger us could have some merit that we’ve overlooked. Some of us consider that we may be getting angry at what we perceive to be the implications of the friend’s argument, rather than his or her actual intention or meaning.
Some of us do these things. I say this only because it seems statistically reasonable to guess that some of us do them. I’m not sure I ever do them, and I’m not sure my friends do either. I’ve had people get mad at me on Facebook when I was agreeing with them.
I’m not proud of the ways I fall short on Facebook, and I’m actually frightened about where this is all leading. It already seems that Facebook is the main cause of our dangerous and perhaps permanent level of polarization, and I’m convinced that this polarization is the main reason Trump was elected. In the past, liberals have felt I was blaming them for that, and my friend Jeff has gently suggested to me (on several gentle occasions) that this is why liberals get mad at me.
I’ll try to lay it out here, in a way that won’t trigger people, Facebook style.
I believe that our polarization is the main factor that led to the election of a clearly unqualified human being. I think our polarization helped people ignore his faults, faults which are obvious to us. (They were obvious to me in the decades before he became a Republican.)
Thus, polarization benefits Donald Trump. Think about that for a moment. Our polarization, which we’ve all helped along the last few decades every time we’ve turned to a friendly news source or shut out a friend or relative, has been the best friend that awful man ever had. It’s been perhaps a better friend to him even than his money, because money alone can’t put you in the Oval Office. There’s a long list of rich guys whose money didn’t get them there.
We may now be in an American moment where all of this is moot. That is quite possible. Things are moving too fast these days for me to process. I envy the straight white males who huddled together and planned this country, because they were thinkers who didn’t have to worry so much about dissent. The common enemy was just awful enough to put differences aside, for a time, but the aftermath of the Revolution was a different story. Things were hotly debated, from what I dimly recall learning in college. I’m not convinced that the system they set up was so wonderful, but it was better than most that had existed in the world to that time.
It’s helpful, maybe, to recall that there was never a consensus about what “America” was, or should be, even then. Our history books, mostly useless, gloss over this in favor of the Texas-schoolbook-purchaser-friendly version that paints all those white guys as heroes with red blood and whatnot.
Even some of the white guys on our side, like Thomas Jefferson, are easy to dismiss today as slave-raping white privilege-benefittin’ men who sat around in libraries congratulating themselves on their rhetorical brilliance. That’s not an entirely unreasonable way to paint him, and I suspect if you are encountered Jefferson in a good mood one-on-one, he wouldn’t entirely disagree. I don’t think he would have liked to see a Facebook friend say it, though.
So, to sum up, it may be too late in the day for my ideas to have a public airing. It may be the case, as some have told me, that my ideas are actually dangerous now, even reckless. I no longer doubt this. I now offer my blessing to liberals who have insulted me, questioned my left wing bona fides, etc. Upon reflection, I understand how you feel about my saying these things. I suspect I won’t say them so much after today.
In closing, let me say this. I like to imagine Ben Franklin seeing my side on this. But I also know that he’d probably be drunk if we were in a pub discussing it. And I imagine he’d be eyeing some comely lass, perhaps one who’d been bringing food to the table, and he’d probably be thinking how much more enjoyable it would be to chat with her instead of with me, and he’d be figuring out a way to let me down easy, helping me see the situation his way without insulting me, and doing it as efficiently as possible, so I’d be his ally from that day forward, but so that he could extricate himself smoothly from our discussion while the night was young.
Ladies, I’m not trying to suggest that womanizing is okay. Nor am I romanticizing the abuse of alcohol. But I’m just pointing out that Franklin got along very well with women AND with the French, and he was possibly the most admired fat American ever, and he lived in an era free from the Republican-approved empty calories that infest our diet today even when we’re in school, learning the bogus lilywhite version of American history. So I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume that he was adept at making a point faster than I ever can, because he had places to be.
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