It's like trying to describe the behavior of a football team without referencing its opposition. What's a good pass completion rate for an NFL QB? Like 50−60%? That's terrible! I've seen drunk guys at tailgate parties complete more passes than that. Why is the NFL hiring such incompetent QBs?
The answer, of course, is that pass completion rates are low because there is ANOTHER TEAM TRYING TO STOP THEM. It's almost too obvious to say about football, but for some reason some people find it difficult to imagine that the Left fails because it is intentionally and actively opposed.
If you just don't mention the opposition, any behavior seems absurd. Why can't the QB make the connection? Why can't climate scientists convince people? Why did the receiver catch the ball and then fall over? Why do trans people keep pissing people off?
The QB can't make the pass because he's passing under pressure. Climate scientists can't convince people because they're opposed by a well-funded and orchestrated climate denial propaganda machine. The receiver fell down because he got tackled.
Trans people face hate because there is a movement filling media with a constant drumbeat of lies about them. The real difference is that in football the point of the game is competitive opposition and there is moral equivalence between the teams pursuing it.
Politics, on the other hand, is about how we structure our shared life together, so there are deep moral stakes. In the last such conversation I had, my interlocutor acknowledged that climate change activists were largely correct, but blamed them for their own failures because they were annoying.
sweet sweet logic
In this model, the backlash to climate scientists was grassroots, spontaneous, and had literally nothing to do with the billions spent by fossil fuel companies and their lobbying arms to actively spread lies that they knew full well were lies.
The same model can apply to any issue: women, people of color, immigrants, LGBT (esp. trans) people, homeless people, poor people, etc. All of these groups are presented as causing their own problems and creating their own opposition.
Add in Jews. And if anyone thinks, “Well, but Jews really cause the hatred against them” then they’ve been brainwashed in the exact same way as what you mention here.
But in each case, there's an opposing team trying to defeat them, to put them or keep them down. In reactionary politics, that opposition thrives by making itself invisible. We should surface it every chance we get.
Doc Harvey, that's one of the clearest depictions of this issue I've seen. I'd add only that if I'm not actually a spectator "at the game," but just hearing bits and piece of it (for myriad reasons), I'm getting increasingly discouraged. Pretty soon I'm not going to listen to any more games.
Agreed. And I think it's important to maintain that distinction between players and spectators (and, probably, vendors at the stadium).