This is a generational problem, Exchemist.
Why is it that, in the United States, whenever the people associated with our traditional heritage do all sorts of injurious damage, we're supposed to excuse them?
Here's a version I've expressed before↗: The need to cast American conservatives as some sort of victims is absurd because this goes back thirty years on one part, over forty years for another, fifty years to yet another, sixty years by what works out to be significant measure, seventy years brings us 'round a circle, or eighty a slightly larger circle.
Misinformed? Yeah. Fairly inarticulate and dim? Yeah. Bur more a whoopsie than "bad"? Okay. Explain it to the dead. Explain it to the victims: Yes, they lynched your son, but the lynchers are the real victims, here.
Another way↗ to put it: The romanticization of the American right as tragic victims can only pretend to make any sense if history is tabula rasa.
Think of it this way: Republicans are behaving so badly, simply describing their behavior moves some to defend them by accusing others↗ of "political rhetoric, intending to enrage those of a non-Republican political persuasion", even when they're already aware↗ the description is accurate.
There is, I confess, a certain stupidity in running around these rightist circles. For instance, there is a telling that paints Trump voters as victims who are lied to by billionaires, but↗: Inasmuch as we might consider right-wing media as a culprit, these are consenting, even demanding consumers. So, sure, we might think of a "few strongly right-wing media outlets … owned by conservative billionaires who are willing to tell lies to make even more billions", but it's not like they had to invent a consumer base.
The juxtaposition of Trump supporters as beleaguered, misinformed victims against some manner of badness doesn't work because this precedes Trump, and will continue after him. I've been through this how many times, now, and it's the sort of thing those who make excuses for these people just don't want to countenance. Misinformed? Sure. Lied to? Sure. Victims? Well, how do you mean? As I explained to another version of this simplistic excuse:
"Bad peple to the core"? Consider actor Wallace Shawn, reflecting on the lessons of his life. If he suggests, "Maybe they didn't want to be gentle or kind," the point is that it's still a maybe. Or, to reiterate my take:
It is hard to accept that so many of our neighbors really would be so cruel. Or, as you summarize, "I guess it's simpler for some to try to blame all the Trump supporters for being bad people to the core. Because that requires less thinking, I guess."
And it's important to reiterate: Even "they" recoil.
• Antisociality: The cruelty, as [Adam] Serwer puts it, is the point. This isn't a new idea. Wallace Shawn's sense of "maybe" is, as he recognizes, a question of perspective; it is hard to accept that so many of our American neighbors really would be so cruel. Nor, in those classifications, is it simply "us" who find it so unbelievable; this wells up from American traditionalism, so "we" are also taught into these perspectives, and even "they" recoil at the prospect of their own cruelty, hatred, and sin.
It is hard to accept that so many of our neighbors really would be so cruel. Or, as you summarize, "I guess it's simpler for some to try to blame all the Trump supporters for being bad people to the core. Because that requires less thinking, I guess."
And it's important to reiterate: Even "they" recoil.
†
Note the thread title: "Supremacism and priority". There are various tellings by which focusing on supremacism is somehow unfair to Republicans and conservatives. None of these, however, recognize the history, that this behavior is fifty, sixty years old; even eighty, now that we must countenance the prospect of Nazis at Madison Square Garden.
It is, then, important to observe priority: It's one thing to suggest↗ the majority of Trump voters have other priorities, but↑ supremacism has been an integral part of the conservative pitch, its most durable appeal, pretty much the whole time I've been voting. Moreover, that period includes Republicans creating other problems they might later complain about, like declining real wages, tax problems, and falling educational standards. And you'd think they might want to fix that stuff, but every time we have a chance, nope, sorry, we have to talk about what's wrong with women, or gay people, or "Mexicans", and so on. Over the years, as a matter of priority, we can see what is important to these voters. An NYT columnist wags↗ that liberals "should think a little more deeply about the enduring sources of [Trump's] appeal", but↑ even that argument invests the enduring appeal in the voters, not Trump.
Three years ago↗, we considered whether Trumpism was fading, and an important point persists: Inasmuch as Trumpism is a brand experience, and the underlying product it is and represents existed before, and will continue in the marketplace, the components of that underlying product are potsherds fashioned into vessels of bitter and poisonous draught. That people sympathize with this or that potsherd eventually adds up to the next iteration.
That is, over and over, no matter what else is going on, the priorities these voters continue to focus on are the supremacism and conspiracism, i.e., "racism or sexism or any of those other bad things", as such, or, "racist white supremacist child sex advocates", as the straw man has it.
†
So, sure, misinformed? Inarticulate? Stupid? Sure, these are circumstances we must consider.
But let us look at a related question: Judgment.
In a roomful of religious people, this might be an easier explanation; in a roomful of atheists, it's kind of a gamble.
For Christians, judgment has ritual significance, but the difference between faith and practice can be messy. That is, the psychology of judgment and forgiveness is also self-empowering: One has judged, and found another lacking, and in their magnanimity the one forgives. It's actually kind of arrogant and, in my lifetime, disruptive and corrosive.
But there is also an argument, within Christianity, that judgment belongs to God alone.
Leave them to arguing the either-or for themselves.
For the rest of us, the answer is that it need not be that kind of judgment. Rather, there is a simple assessment: ¿Does the danger persist?
And in this case, the answer is yes.
That's the problem.
†
So, it's just that whether it's you, or James R, or the NYT columnist, there is a simplistic presupposition in effect about what liberal critics are doing wrong. It's not just that you're standing up for something, but that you're arguing against something else, and the problem is that argument against is fallacious.
Thus, as I've explained before:
• Start with the basic idea that it doesn't feel good to be told you're wrong, and for most people feels even worse when facts affirm that they were wrong.
• For American conservatives, that's the last thirty years. At least.
• It's one thing to imagine thirty years of persistent invalidation, but something also goes here about self-infliction.
• For American conservatives, that's the last thirty years. At least.
• It's one thing to imagine thirty years of persistent invalidation, but something also goes here about self-infliction.
Like the fallacy about "merely dismissing the views of people who voted for [Trump] as obviously crazy, or motivated by racism or sexism or any of those other bad things"; as I've pointed out, repeatedly, that's just make-believe. Or, sure, if we presuppose a circumstantial vacuum, it sounds like a reasonable proposition. But we're not in a circumstantial vacuum. If the idea of "merely dismissing" has any validity, it is found in conservatives who are tired of being told they're wrong about pretty much everything, but have no solid argument to fall back on. Please understand: When we strip away all of the political, emotional, or subjective language, the fact remains that someone was wrong about something. And it's true, after thirty years, at least, of losing because they're wrong, it probably feels to conservatives like that's all anyone knows about them.
And as I keep trying to make clear: It keeps coming up because they keep asking us to consider it. At some point, downstream expectations of some sort of reset, some manner of setting history aside and learning nothing so that we don't hurt conservative feelings, are nothing more than insisting on make-believe.
It's akin to Beauchamp↗ on a free speech debate in the U.S. a few years back: What was at stake was not anyone's right to speech, but, rather, their right to freedom from disapprobation. Or Spiers on cancel culture, "apparently defined as any sort of consequences for displays of bigotry that happen to be driven by social opprobrium".
And conservatives get upset because they heard the criticism last time, and the time before that, and the time before that. But that's the thing, they keep bringing it, so they keep hearing about it.
And this priority stands out, i.e., "supremacism and priority". These are the things that are more important than the other reasons; these are the priorities they assert over and over again.
