getting past the filter
I’ve been reading right-wing media - not all the time, because the point of the exercise is understanding and past a point it just breeds exhaustion. But my impression is that the way right-wing media interprets the protests and the outrage and the fear and anger at Trump’s presidency is something like this:
The left won a lot of battles in a row, and they got used to winning every fight they got into, so they picked fights that they couldn’t possibly really care about, just to grind our faces in the dirt. And then they lost! And we won! And they are handling this with immature hysteria and obstructionism and riots, and we basically have to wade through them to put the country back on the rails, and where we fail it’s their fault and where we succeed it proves that they’re ineffectual and intellectually bankrupt and have no tactics beyond crying and complaining and calling people racist. And they’re complaining about things they were fine with under Obama so they’re not actually sincere anyway. And they still have a stranglehold nearly everywhere, but maybe now people’ll start to see through them and we’ll have a chance to roll it back.)
(Some examples of fights we ‘couldn’t possibly really care about’: making employers cover health care plans that included contraception coverage, making bakers bake wedding cakes for gay people, letting trans people use restrooms of their choice.)
And the presence of the narrative imposes a sort of filter, where things you do that make sense within it, or reinforce it, don’t get seen by half the country. Sometimes that doesn’t matter. But sometimes it really does; sometimes I want to be able to talk to the people who voted for Trump and be heard and be understood to be saying what I’m actually saying and not just ‘blah blah liberals won and won and won and can’t handle losing and are going to call you racist no matter what racist racist racist’.
So, obviously, I think this narrative is unfair in many, many ways. But what I’m really interested in right now is, what could a person do or say in order to slip past the narrative? Because it’s, well, encompassing - narratives usually are. Peaceful protests fit into the ‘the left is all bluster and whining’ arm of it and violent protests fit into ‘the left is a danger’ arm of it and no protests fit into the ‘we are the silent majority’ arm of it. And there are battles which really are worth fighting but which are trivial and silly to people sufficiently removed from them, like fights over letting trans people use public restrooms.
But narratives are not all-encompassing - the vocal opposition of Senator McCain to Trump’s conduct doesn’t fit into it at all, the conservative judges overturning Trump’s executive orders doesn’t fit into it very well, the testimony of veterans about why their translators saved their lives and deserve the opportunity to live here which they were promised doesn’t fit into it.
Those are, of course, all examples of conservatives who can challenge the narrative by already having credibility within it. I can’t think of a great way for a liberal to establish that credibility - emphasizing that you understand why they believe the things they believe was tried very loudly during the campaign, and I think it mostly totally failed (both at establishing that, and at going from ‘we understand each other’ to ‘the filter you’re seeing me through isn’t capturing what I want and what I actually want is reasonable and comprehensible and human’.)
I feel like one important project of the next few months is figuring out how to communicate past the filter, how to say things that aren’t easily sorted into the narrative, and how to build from there enough trust that our concerns and fear and anger are heard as concern and fear and anger, instead of being easy to round off as ‘they lost and they’re sore losers’. I want past the filter. I want to be able to make myself understood. And I do still think that there’s some way that can be achieved.
I know that you mean what you say, even though I disagree on a number of key policies. They don’t. There is a risk that any way of bypassing the filter will get seen as cynical political manipulation - or will end up that way since politicals will start abusing it just like they abused the term “racist”. But then, I knew about you well before the election.
