In the wake of Trumps victory I have been making an effort to go into right wing spaces and see what is being said. I tend to keep to my leftist echo chamber but I have come to realise that's probably not the best thing to do if I actually want to understand why Trump won.
So far I've gathered that many people who voted for Trump simply feel that the left are too emotional, and too quick to scream 'nazi/evil/stupid' at people, and this turns them off. Obviously this isn't the only reason. It's also not new, the hate against 'feminazi's' was where I remember it beginning. As a leftist I believe that we are like this because we are experiencing discrimination and hate crimes that are overlooked and denied by a lot of people, and so many of us find it quite hard to engage in a rational discussion with 'someone who wants me dead'. And we forget that not everyone who is on the right feels this way.
I've had great discussions recently with my right wing mother because I've been able to just swallow my pride and ignore the offensive thing she thinks about me as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and just find common ground. We both want things to be reasonably priced and for there to be opportunities and healthcare available. She believes that this is being given to illegal immigrants and not 'the people who already live here. But she doesn't hate people based on their skin colour. She agrees that in an ideal world, all of us in the world should get these things. She hates billionaires and hates that some people can't eat, and agrees that Bezos and Co could sort it out tomorrow but won't. She's come to see that Trump and Elon are in fact the rich that she claims to hate. She also seems to be less radical on transgender issues now. I'm pretty sure that she thought transgender = fetish because of what she's been consuming online, and that ALL trans people were only doing it for nefarious reasons. I'm also slowly getting her to understand that the statistics on transgender surgeries have been severely scewed, and minors aren't just having their genitals chopped off after an hour conversation with a doctor.
Call me crazy but I don't think I
she would have got to where she is now if I had continued to have her cut out of my life and have continued to listen to my partner telling me that she was Hitler reincarnated. I respect their decision to not want to ever be near my Mother but I also don't see how cutting out everyone who has these beliefs is going to help us to actually win people over.
I know there's the saying 'If there's a nazi at the table and 9 people sitting with him, there's 10 Nazis at the table' or something, but I can't help but think of that video of the black man talking to members of the KKK and making friends with them. I think we are really doing ourselves a disservice by smearing everyone who flirts with these ideas, whether that's mildly right wing or even a white supremacist, as the enemy who are too far gone / too stupid / too ignorant. For me, unless someone is actually at my door trying to kill me for being gay or black, being empathetic of why they got to the place they are in the first place is going to go way further than hating and dismissing them for already being there.
Of course some people won't even have a rational discussion but I think we need to be more willing to try and just be curious about why people believe the things they do, and leave emotions out of it, as hard as that can be when you feel like your livelihood and safety is on the line.
